Leading scholar of international refugee and migration law appointed Full Professor at UCD Sutherland School of Law

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Cathryn Costello to the position of Full Professor of Law at UCD Sutherland School of Law.

Cathryn Costello is currently Professor of Fundamental Rights, and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, Berlin and Andrew W Mellon Professor of International Refugee and Migration Law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, and has held fellowships at the University of Melbourne and New York University. 

Professor Costello is a leading scholar of international refugee and migration law, and has pioneered the study of the intersection of labour and migration law. She is co-editor with Michelle Foster and Jane McAdam of the Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (OUP 2021). Her monograph on the Human Rights of Migrants and Refugees in European Law (OUP 2015) was co-awarded the 2016 Odysseus Academic Prize for ‘outstanding academic research in the area of European Immigration or Asylum Law’. She is currently in the final stages of an ERC project, RefMig, on mobility, status and rights in the global refugee and migration regimes (www.refmig.org), and is also the lead principal investigator of a Volkswagen European challenges project on automated decision-making in asylum and migration, AFAR.

Professor Costello has a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, an LLM from the College of Europe, Bruges, and a BCL from University College Cork. She commenced her academic career at the Law School, Trinity College Dublin, where she also directed the Irish Centre for European Law. 

Professor Colin Scott, Principal, UCD College of Social Sciences and Law and Vice President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at UCD said: ‘Professor Costello will be joining the Faculty in July 2023, bringing not only outstanding teaching experience and research credentials, but also great experience of interdisciplinary institution building. At UCD, she will develop new institutional collaborations on global migration law and governance.’ 

Professor Laurent Pech, Dean of Law and Head of the UCD Sutherland School of Law commented: ‘The Sutherland School of Law is delighted to welcome Professor Costello, a leading scholar of international and European refugee and migration law. Her appointment will further strengthen our School’s teaching and research capabilities in many aspects of EU and human rights law.’

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC appointed Adjunct Full Professor at UCD Sutherland School of Law

We are pleased to announce that leading human rights lawyer, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, will join the School as an Adjunct Full Professor from September 2023. Caoilfhionn is a graduate of the school and was awarded the UCD Law Alumni Award in 2017. She practises as a barrister with Doughty Street Chambers in London and is a specialist in human rights law, public law, media law, inquests/inquiries, community care and prison law.

Caoilfhionn has acted in many landmark human rights cases before the European Court of Human Rights, United Nations bodies and other international tribunals, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and courts in the UK and a number of other jurisdictions.

Her prominent work has included acting for bereaved families and survivors of the 7/7 London bombings and the Hillsborough disaster, and her involvement in a number of high-profile case related to journalists’ safety, including acting for the family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was assassinated in Malta in 2017, and Jimmy Lai, the media owner, writer and pro-democracy campaigner imprisoned in Hong Kong. Earlier this year she was appointed as Ireland’s special rapporteur on child protection.

We look forward to the contribution that Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC will make to the school and the inspiration she will provide to our students.

Court of Appeal Workshop

Dr Mark Coen and Dr Noel McGrath coordinated a two-day workshop on the Court of Appeal of Ireland on Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th May 2023. Fifteen papers were delivered over two days by distinguished scholars from Ireland and other jurisdictions. The workshop is a key aspect of a project examining the first ten years of the Court of Appeal, which was established following a constitutional referendum in 2014. The project is located in the Centre for the Common Law in Europe (CCLE) in the Sutherland School of Law.

Copy of Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry Book Presented to the President of Ireland

On Wednesday 10 May 2023 Dr Mark Coen of the Sutherland School of Law at UCD, along with his co-editors Professor Katherine O'Donnell (School of Philosophy, UCD) and Dr Maeve O'Rourke (Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway), presented a copy of their book A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland to President Michael D Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin. 

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, the book examines the history and legacy of Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry, which operated from 1837 to 1992. The book's interdisciplinary approach and discovery of new information that contradicts the official State narrative on the Magdalene Laundries has received widespread media coverage, some of which is available here.

Photo credit: Ann Lane

UCD team wins the 2023 Corn Adomnáin – International Humanitarian Law Competition

UCD School of Law Winning team (l to r) Donna Paru, Moyin Adelakun and Alanna Grogan

The UCD team of three brilliant law students – Moyin Adelakun, Alanna Grogan and Donna Parau – won the 2023 Corn Adomnáin International Humanitarian Law Competition. The team was supported in their preparations by Dr Amrei Müller, Lecturer/Assistant Professor (Ad Astra Fellow) at UCD Sutherland School of Law. We congratulate our students for this outstanding achievement!

The Corn Adomnáin competition is organised annually for students studying law in Ireland by the Irish Red Cross (IRC). This year, the competition was hosted by UCD Centre for Human Rights in the Sutherland School of Law on the 11^th of March 2023. The Centre is very grateful for this excellent cooperation with the IRC.

Built around a fictitious case study of an armed conflict, nine teams from Irish universities were competing in role-plays and simulations, challenging participants to explain and apply the core rules of IHL. The activities covered the protection of historical monuments, the local environment, agricultural sites as well as dams and dykes; the detention of prisoners of war (POWs) and members of armed groups; the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in armed conflicts; and the protections IHL affords to women and to victims of rape and sexual violence in armed conflict. The competition also included a gaming scenario where teams had to make decisions in real-time on the conduct of a ground operation in accordance with IHL. The competition ended an International Criminal Court (ICC) moot court involving a case against a General and a Commander. The moot court was judged by Judges Shireen Fisher (Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone), Hilkka Becker (International Protection Appeals Tribunal) and Patricia McNamara (District Court).

UCD Centre for Human Rights and Sutherland School of Law are very proud of the winning UCD team! 

UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran BURSARIES 

Call for Applications

The UCD Sutherland School of Law is now inviting applications for the UCD Sutherland Opportunity Supported by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Bursaries from undergraduate and graduate law students in the School who are facing economic or financial challenges.

This very generous bursary scheme is funded by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP and is designed to support UCD law students who face a financial challenge in continuing their undergraduate studies, or in pursuing graduate study at UCD Sutherland School of Law.

Incoming exchange students are not eligible to apply for these bursaries (although incoming BCL/Maitrise students are eligible to apply).

Students who have previously applied for a bursary - whether successfully or unsuccessfully - are very welcome to apply again. Also students already in receipt of Cothram na Féinne scholarships as part of UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP are welcome to apply for bursaries.

All applications must be completed via the relevant online application form – click here to access the application form.

Applicants must provide their student name, student number and UCDConnect email address on the form.

The closing deadline for submission of fully completed applications is by no later than 5pm on Wednesday, 8 February 2023.

(Please note that if you don't see the form it may be that you need to sign into your google/UCD connect account. If you are on an Apple device, you may need to use another browser other than Safari)

HRER/ UCD Conference 12 June 2023: Programme now available

We are pleased to announce that the programme for this conference is now available to download here .

This conference is hosted by the UCD Centre for Human Rights in association with the International Conference for Education and Democratic Citizenship (ICEDC) and Human Rights Education Review

Date/Time: Monday 12 June 2023, 9.30 – 17.00

Venue: University College Dublin, Centre for Human Rights, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

Title:  Human Rights and Education: past, present and future.

Background 

The ICEDC annual conference is a meeting place for scholars, researchers, graduate students, education policymakers, and civil society activists from across Europe and internationally.  This year’s annual conference is being organised by the UCD Centre for Human Rights in Dublin, Ireland in association with the journal  Human Rights Education Review (HRER).  The conference will be a unique opportunity to present and discuss current research and policy relating to education for human rights and democratic citizenship. We welcome research papers and poster presentations addressing education for human rights and democratic citizenship from sociology, education, law, history, politics, geography and other relevant disciplines, as well as analyses of policy and case studies of campaigns and curriculum development.  

Call for papers (Deadline 13 March 2023) 

The 14th ICEDC Annual Conference is a contribution to the World Education Research Association (WERA) International Research Network (IRN) in Human Rights Education (HRE).  It will take place on the 75th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human RIghts (UDHR) which was adopted by the UN in 1948. Education is central to the fulfillment of many of the rights in the Declaration and Article 26 of the text expressly provides that the right to education itself should be directed “...to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

The conference welcomes papers that explicitly address the theory and practice of human rights education and children’s rights education. Human rights and international law are threatened by the flouting of international commitments in the name of national interest  and security concerns. Human rights education is ever more urgently required to ensure populations are aware of the role of human rights in promoting freedom, justice and peace  in the world.  

We invite papers that address issues of human rights and education. We welcome papers  that focus on ways in which this right has been and is being respected, protected and  fulfilled in different contexts. Papers may also address issues where this right has been  denied through discrimination by, for instance, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality.  Our primary focus is past and present but we also welcome papers which address the future of human rights education and ways of strengthening the HRE curriculum.  

The WERA IRN, established in 2019, has a founding membership from 10 countries across 4 continents. The founding members are also members of the editorial team of Human Rights Education Review, an open access, online international scholarly journal published by the University of South-Eastern Norway. Human Rights Education Review (HRER) provides a forum for research and critical scholarship on human rights and diversity in education internationally, and it forms a pillar of the WERA IRN. Our plan is to publish some of the best papers from ICEDC 2023.  

Abstracts of no more than 300 words including name, institutional affiliation and contact  email should be sent, no later than Monday 13 March 2023 to: Dr. Suzanne Egan, suzanne.egan@ucd.ie. All abstracts will be peer reviewed by members of the ICEDC steering  group (Professor Audrey Osler, Professor Hugh Starkey and Dr. Suzanne Egan). Please indicate whether you would prefer to give an oral or a poster presentation.  Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the review by Tuesday 21 March 2023.  

Professor Gráinne de Búrca awarded UCD Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws

Prof Imelda Maher, Prof Laurent Pech, Prof Orla Feely, Prof Gráinne de Búrca and Prof Colin Scott

Professor Gráinne de Búrca, New York University Law School, was recently awarded a UCD Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws.  UCD Sutherland School of Law was pleased to have had this opportunity to honour one of the school's most distinguished alumni. 

Professor de Búrca is the Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law at NYU.  She is a law graduate of UCD, the University of Michigan and Kings Inns. She started her career as a researcher at the Law Reform Commission in Dublin before moving to Oxford University and then onto the prestigious European University Institute in Florence. She was the first Irish person to hold a tenured chair at Harvard Law School before taking up her current role at NYU.  Her work has covered three important and related domains of law: European Union Law, Human Rights Law, and Constitutional Law. She is widely published across these areas and, in her career to date, has edited or co-edited eleven books.  This is in addition to her more than 80 articles and book chapters in prestigious journals and edited collections. 

At the conferring ceremony in O’Reilly Hall, our colleague, Professor Imelda Maher, delivered a wonderful tribute to Professor de Búrca before a large audience of graduating students and their families. Professor Maher took the opportunity to outline Professor de Búrca’s many achievements and her unrivalled contribution to the field of law. She described how Professor de Búrca has been an inspiration for generations of law students, with a distinctive voice which is rigorous, original, exacting in legal analysis, while engaging with and advancing debates on governance and law. Professor Maher added that her scholarship has advanced the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of law which is why UCD is proud to award her with an honorary doctorate.

Professor Maher’s full citation for Professor Gráinne de Búrca can be read at this link.

Further Learning in Employment Law

We are delighted to offer graduates of the Professional Diploma in Employment Law the chance to attend a number of update lectures in 2023.  Graduates of the Diploma may register at the booking link below to attend the following lectures in the 2023 Diploma programme:

1 February 2023: Practice and Procedure before the WRC and Labour Court (Kevin Roche BL)

This lecture will include an examination of developments since the Supreme Court decision in Zalewski, including the enactment of the Workplace Relations (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2021 and the adoption of the Labour Court Rules 2022.

1 March 2023: Protected Disclosures (Dr Lauren Kierans BL)

This lecture will examine the changes to the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 brought about by the implementation of Directive 2019/1937/EU through the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Act 2022.

30* March 2023: Gender Pay Equality (Dr Sara La Huerta)

This lecture will examine the Gender Pay Gap Information Act 2021 and the Employment Equality Act 1998 (Section 20A) (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations (S.I. No. 264 of 2022).

5 April 2023: Organisation of Working Time (Anthony Kerr SC)

This lecture will include an examination of recent decisions of the CJEU on the status of “standby/on-call time” (Case C-344/19, Radiotelevisija Slovenija; Case C-107/19, Dopravni) and annual leave entitlements (Case C-214/16, King; Case C-684/16 Shimizu; Case C-385/17, Hein; Case C-120/21, LB).

12 April 2023: Workplace Privacy (Cathal McGreal BL)

This lecture will include an examination of the implications for workplaces of the Data Protection Act 2018 and the decisions of the ECtHR in Barbulescu and Lopex Ribalda.

Lectures will generally take place on Wednesday evenings between 18:00 and 20:00 in the Sutherland School of Law (*Note: 30 March is a Thursday).   The cost to attend an individual lecture is €250 or €1000 for all five.   Register below to attend or if you have any queries please email lawdiplomas@ucd.ie.

UCD Law Team wins the National Moot Court Competition 2022

(L to R) Méabh de Courcy MacDonnell, Robert O’Sullivan, Ms Justice Carmel Stewart, Mr Justice John McMenamin, Tom Casey and Hugh Joyce

Congratulations to our three final year law students who made up the winning team at The National Moot Court Competition 2022. They were Méabh de Courcy MacDonnell (Stage 4, BCL), Hugh Joyce (Stage 4, Business and Law) and Robert O’Sullivan (Stage 4, BCL).

The National Moot Court Competition, organised by Dublin City University (DCU), is an annual inter-law school event designed to give law students an opportunity to showcase their skills before prominent members of the legal profession.

The competition took place on 19 November in the Criminal Courts of Justice with 26 teams from across Ireland and the UK competing. The final was held in front of a judging panel of Mr Justice John McMenamin of the Supreme Court, Ms Justice Carmel Stewart of the High Court and Tom Casey, Partner at A&L Goodbody Solicitors. The UCD team came up against a strong Dublin City University (DCU) team in the final with Hugh Joyce awarded Best Speaker.

Mooting and Advocacy is a popular subject for final year students in UCD Sutherland School of Law.  It is taught by Associate Professor James McDermott who is a practising barrister and coached the winning UCD team.

Dr Michael F Farrell, human rights activist, awarded Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws

Prof Colin Scott, Dr Liam Thornton, Dr Michael Farell, Prof Mark Rogers, Dr Niamh Thornton

UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to confer the renowned human rights activist, Dr Michael F Farrell, with an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws at a recent graduation ceremony.

Our colleague, Dr Liam Thornton, delivered a wonderful tribute to Dr Farrell outlining his many achievements.  Dr Thornton spoke about how he dedicated his professional life to highlighting injustices within our society and how he has utilised law as a means to uphold the civil and human rights of marginalised groups.

Michael Farell is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast, and the University of Strathclyde. Hailing from Magherafelt in County Derry, he was a civil rights leader and activist in the 1960s and 1970s.  In the 1980s, he gained a distinguished reputation in journalism, highlighting amongst other issues, the campaign for justice for the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.

Having subsequently obtained a legal qualification, he was the first Irish lawyer who, on behalf of his client, brought a case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. He then joined the Free Legal Advice Centres, FLAC, where his litigation work has been highly praised in social welfare law,  asylum and refugee law and the rights of persons who are transgender. At the Irish Council for Civil Liberties his work on the Law Society’s Human Rights Committee, contributed positively to a whole range of areas for proposed law reform.

Dr Thornton’s full citation for Dr Michael F Farell can be read at this link.

UCD Law alumna, Judge Síofra O’Leary, appointed president of European Court of Human Rights

UCD Sutherland School of Law warmly congratulates our distinguished UCD Law alumna, Judge Síofra O’Leary, who took up the role of president of the European Court of Human Rights on 1 November. She is the first woman and the first Irish person to serve as president of the court in its 63-year history.  The court has jurisdiction in respect of 46 member states with a population of 675 million.

Judge O’Leary is a 1989 BCL graduate from UCD and has been a regular visitor to the school.  In 2017 she delivered the Walsh Lecture on the topic 'Balancing Rights in a Digital Age' and in October 2019 joined her classmates to celebrate their Milestone Reunion.

The appointment of the Dublin-born judge has been welcomed across the political and legal professions and amongst human rights activists in Ireland.

Prior to taking up her role, she and a delelgation of six senior members of the European Court of Human Rights visited Ireland. The two-day visit began with a series of meetings with senior members of the Irish judiciary focused on the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights.  The visit of the ECHR delegation coincided with Ireland’s presidency of the Council of Europe and Chief Justice Donal O’Donnell described this as a “truly historic event”, noting that the protection of rights “is, if anything, more pressing than it was almost 70 years ago when Ireland ratified the convention”.

Large numbers of Alumni attend the 2022 Milestone Reunion

We were delighted to host a Milestone Reunion in Sutherland School of Law for the first time since 2019. This year it was the classes of 1982, 1992, 2002 and 2012 who came together to celebrate their Milestone years.

After two years of in person events being curtailed, it was wonderful to see the nearly 200 alumni gather together again in person and enjoy sharing stories, memories and rekindling connections. Following a welcome from UCD Alumni Relations, guests enjoyed music by the wonderful harpist and canapes and wine. The alumni were taken on a brief walk down memory lane by UCD law faculty stalwart, Lecturer John O’Dowd, who highlighted some key moments from the School in the years that had passed since many were last on campus. Indeed, some of John’s former students were among those present on the night.and many more had never visited Sutherland building previously and we were able to admire its excellent facilities.

Each class subsequently moved to breakout rooms to spend more time together with their peers, listen to their class speakers, swap stories and have their class photo taken (see photo gallery below). 

As ever, the Class Reps were a tremendous help to the Alumni Relations team in contacting classmates, helping gather a memorable selection of photos from across the years which were displayed on digital screens during the event, and creating a great atmosphere.for this wonderful occasion. We are grateful to all who assisted in making the night such a great success.

To ensure you don’t miss out on news of Reunions and other UCD Sutherland School of Law events, please make sure we have your up to date details so we can contact you. You can update your details here: https://alumni.ucd.ie/updateyourdetails/

The Class of 1982

The Class of 1992

The BCL Class of 2002

The BBLS CLass of 2002

The BCL and BBL Classes of 2012

Unveiling of Portrait of Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness

Dr Mark Coen, Miseon Lee, Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness and Tara Doyle at the unveiling. Photo credit: Ann Lane

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Dr Mark Coen for leading a project that culminated in a portrait being commissioned of former Supreme Court judge Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness for the National Gallery of Ireland.

President Michael D Higgins unveiled the portrait at an event attended by Judge McGuinness’ family and friends and by guests from the worlds of law and politics. Several UCD Law alumni, including Mr Justice Gerard Hogan, Mr Justice Michael Peart and broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan were also in attendance

The unveiling was the culmination of a project that began in 2019, when Dr Mark Coen contacted the Director of the Gallery, Sean Rainbird, making the case for the inclusion of a portrait of Judge McGuinness in the national collection. Dr Coen liaised with the Gallery and with Judge McGuinness herself, and recruited a generous donor, Tara Doyle, who presented the portrait to the nation.

The portrait, by artist Miseon Lee, has been much admired by visitors to the Gallery since it went on display. It is a portrait of Catherine McGuinness the person rather than a formal judicial portrait and is a fitting tribute to her long and varied life of public service, including time as a senator, member of the Council of State and President of the Law Reform Commission.

Dr Łukasz Grzejdziak appointed to EU Project for sustainable reforms in Ukraine's justice sector 

Dr. hab. Łukasz Grzejdziak, the Ronan Harty Newman Fellow at the Sutherland School of Law, has been appointed an International Expert in a major training program in Ukraine organised with the National School
of Judges of Ukraine and funded by the EU through the Pravo-Justice Project. The Project aims to share best practice between the Ukrainian authorities and experts from the EU Member States with a view to sustainable reforms in the justice sector of Ukraine.

In his role, Dr. Grzejdziak leads a series of training and workshop sessions (working remotely) for Ukrainian judges on the Fundamentals of the EU Law. During the workshops, judges will have the opportunity to learn crucial knowledge about the legal and institutional framework of the European Union and its major policies.

Mr Justice Gerard Hogan launches ‘Palles: The Legal Legacy of the Last Lord Chief Baron’

On October 5, the Sutherland School of Law hosted the launch of Palles: The Legal Legacy of the Last Lord Chief Baron (Four Courts Press, 2022), co-edited by Professor Oonagh Breen and Dr Noel McGrath.  The book, which is the culmination of a 5-year research initiative involving law and history academics from UCD, TCD, NUIM, UCC and Denver Colorado, celebrates the judicial legacy of Christopher Palles (1831-1920), one of the common law’s longest serving judges, a century after his death. In his keynote speech, Mr Justice Gerard Hogan congratulated the book’s contributors on producing “beautiful, elegant and interesting essays” and commended the work as a fitting tribute to the Chief Baron. The Law School was delighted to welcome UCD Library staff who displayed some of the Palles Special Collection, including Palles’ manuscript charge sheets; and Noelle Dowling, Archivist of the Archdiocese of Dublin, who displayed the draft trust deed gifting Palles’ library to the newly formed UCD, along with correspondence relating to the valuation of the Palles’ library which Archbishop Walsh purchased from the Palles estate in 1920. 

The launch was well attended by friends and colleagues of UCD Law School, including Law school alumni, members of the judiciary, members of the Irish Legal History Society and representatives of Clongowes Wood College. The book is available for purchase from Four Courts Press.

Anthony Kerr SC, Professor Oonagh Breen and Chief Justice Donal O’Donnell examining the UCD Special Collection’s Palles’ books.

 Book Contributors, (Dr) Desmond Ryan BL, Beth Cope Whitenight (representing the late Tom Cope), (Assoc Professor) Kevin Costello, Mr Justice Gerard Hogan, (Dr) Noel McGrath BL, (Professor) Oonagh Breen, (Associate Professor) Niamh Howlin and (Dr) Mark Coen

 Anthony Kerry SC, Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh and Dr Mark Coen

Brian Dempsey SC with Professor Gavin Barrett

Professor Paul O’Connor,  Judge Kathyrn Hutton and Daire Hogan with ArchDiocese archives in the background

Conferring of UCD Matheson PhD Scholar in Commercial Law

Dr Alexandru-Gabriel Soptica-Vid with Dr Niamh Howlin, Dean of Law

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Dr Alexandru-Gabriel Soptica-Vid who was recently conferred with a Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). He was the recipient of the UCD Matheson Scholarship in Commercial Law while in UCD and was supervised throughout his PhD by our colleague, Dr Mary-Catherine Lucey.  Alexandru’s thesis title was: “Reformulating the contribution of EU Private International Law to the development of the private enforcement of EU competition law”.

Alexandru has written the following piece about his doctoral studies at UCD Sutherland School of Law:

“My PhD thesis combined two specialised areas of EU law, namely EU competition law and EU Private International Law (PIL). Public enforcement has been the mechanism traditionally used for safeguarding the objectives of EU competition law. More recently, the EU legislator is investing significant effort in designing a complementary private enforcement mechanism which allows individuals to seek remedies before national courts against the harmful effects produced by breaches of the Treaty rules on competition. The majority of these claims include cross-border elements, and, the EU PIL instruments are indispensable to answer the questions of which courts have jurisdiction to hear the claim and what law applies to the matter. The thesis answers the question of: ‘what is and should be the role of EU PIL in the development of the EU competition law private enforcement mechanism?’.

I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Dr Mary Catherine Lucey who has helped me enormously during my programme, particularly during my final two years during the Covid pandemic which have been very challenging.

I am also thankful to Matheson for generously supporting my research activity through the ‘UCD Matheson Doctoral Scholarship in Commercial Law’. Furthermore, I am thankful for their moral support, as it was a rewarding experience each time I was invited at the Matheson offices to present my research findings.

Prior to the PhD degree in UCD Sutherland School of Law, I studied an LLM in International Commercial Law at University of Aberdeen in Scotland and a Bachelor of Laws at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania “.

UCD PhD Student Awarded Irish Research Council Funding

Congratulations to UCD Law PhD candidate, Sharon Etokhana, who has been awarded doctoral funding from the Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Scheme. Having successfully completed a bachelor’s degree in Law (LLB) in Lancaster University, United Kingdom in 2017, she qualified as a Barrister-at-Law and Solicitor in the Nigerian Law School in 2018. In 2019, she completed a Master’s degree (LLM) specialising in human rights and criminal justice at the University of Limerick, graduating with first class honours degree. In 2021, Sharon commenced her PhD in law at University College Dublin.

Sharon’s PhD research asks how and why Irish law developed its current sex trafficking law model. The research analyses what changes may be necessary within law and/or policy to enhance human rights compliance. Sharon’s research provides an opportunity for comprehensive critical analysis on the complexities present in the sex trafficking law and policy in light of political influences, feminist theoretical discourse and migrant specific needs and vulnerabilities. Through in-depth contextual analysis of law, policy and practice from a rights-based approach, a strategy for the prevention and prosecution of sex trafficking in proposed. The research is supervised by Dr Liam Thornton, associate professor, UCD Sutherland School of Law. The enterprise partner for this research is Akina Dada wa Africa( AkiDwA) a Dublin based migrant women NGO

Professor Laurent Pech appointed Dean at UCD Sutherland School of Law

Professor Colin Scott, Principal of the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, has announced the appointment of Professor Laurent Pech as the incoming Dean at UCD Sutherland School of Law. He will take over the role from Dr Niamh Howlin in October for a three-year term after which he will then hold a continuing appointment as Full Professor of Law in the School. The Sutherland School of Law is delighted to welcome Professor Pech to the position and looks forward to his leadership over the next number of years.

Laurent Pech is currently Professor of European Law and Head of the Law and Politics Department at Middlesex University London. He is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Bordeaux University, a Senior Research Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest, and the co-director of The Good Lobby Profs which he co-founded in 2021. From 2018 to 2022, Laurent was a member of a H2020 funded four-year multidisciplinary research project on "Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law" (RECONNECT). He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, a member of the advisory board of RECLAIM (Human Rights NGO based in Brussels) and the international advisory boards of GEM-DIAMON (EU Horizon funded research project) and RESILIO (Resilience observatory on the rule of law in Europe funded by Stiftung Mercator). Laurent has been a visiting professor at many institutions, including his alma mater: Aix-Marseille University. In September 2022, Laurent will be based at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, following his appointment as Visiting Fellow. 

Professor Pech specialises in EU Public Law and has lectured in a variety of subjects including EU Constitutional Law, EU Internal Market Law, EU Competition Law and European Human Rights Law. He was Jean Monnet Chair of European Public Law from 2014-17. Prior to his appointment at Middlesex University, Laurent was Jean Monnet Lecturer in EU Public Law at the National University of Ireland Galway. During the course of his academic career, Laurent also worked in Canada (Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Canada Research Chair on Globalization, Citizenship and Democracy) and in the United States (Emile Noel Fellow at NYU Law). He has worked as a legal consultant in many post-conflict or EU candidate countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Latvia and Montenegro. He has also worked as an external examiner at many institutions including the Law Society of Ireland  and regularly works as an expert evaluator for national research funding bodies as well as the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Laurent is the author of one casebook, two monographs, multiple commissioned reports and studies, and more than one hundred scholarly publications, on such subjects as rule of law backsliding in Europe, the right to an independent tribunal established by law and the right to free speech in comparative law. He also regularly provides expert advice on rule of law matters, including in the context of judicial proceedings either before national or European courts.

The Class of 2022 

Business and Law

Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL)

Law with Economics

Law with Politics

Law with History

Law with Social Justice

Law with French Law

Law with Philosophy 

Law and Chinese Studies

Law with Irish

Magdalene Laundries: Told, Acknowledged and Not Forgotten

The College of Social Sciences & Law recently held a powerful panel discussion on the “Magdalene Laundries: Told, Acknowledged and Not Forgotten” at the 2022 UCD Festival on June 11.

Based on the book, “Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice”, authored by a number of UCD alumni and academics, this conversation examined how the Justice for Magdalenes campaign changed the mindset of Irish society and led to the Government’s announcement of a national site of research and remembrance. The discussion was facilitated by Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland. The panel included UCD BCL alumna Dr Maeve O'Rourke, activist Mary Harney and Magdalene Laundry survivor Lyndsay Rehn.

Dr O’Rourke, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and School of Law, NUI Galway, who is also a co-author of the book, began by providing a realistic understanding of the historical background and explanation of how the book came about. Maeve explained, 

“In 1993, Mary Rafertaigh found out that the nuns in High Park which was one of the 10 Magdalene Laundries. High Park in Drumcondra had sold some land and it turned out when Mary dug into this sale that they had managed to get a license for exhumation and cremation of 155 women without producing death certificates for the majority and without producing death certificates for the majority of them, without being able to name all of the women and that still remains to be the case today so the Justice for Campaign was in response to the fact that injustice is not historical. It was so clear then that it was ongoing and it’s so clear now that it is. 

The book chronicles all of the work for Justice for Magdalenes and others did to bring about a State apology in 2013 to survivors of the Magdalene Laundries. It situates the Magdalene Laundries in that much broader context of institutional and family separation abuse that affected more than 1% of the Irish population in the 20th century. Professor Ian O’Donnell of UCD Sutherland School of Law and Eoin O’Sullivan (Trinity College Dublin) have demonstrated that by 1951 over 1% of the Irish population was incarcerated so the Magdalene Laundries is part of that whole system.”

Mary and Lyndsay shared their personal experiences and also focused on where things are currently at for the Campaign and what they’re hoping will happen in the near future to acknowledge the survivors and educate the nation. 

Mary who was born in Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution, illegally fostered and later sent to an industrial school from the age of 5-16, is determined that future generations of Irish citizens shall know, through education and memorialization the truth about Ireland's institutions and to ensure they are never forgotten. 

Lyndsay is a Magdalene survivor who spent time in An Grianan and worked in the laundry as a young girl. Accompanied by a number of other survivors, Lyndsay instigated the Judicial Review to have An Grianan included in the Magdalene Redress Scheme. She opened the door for others in similar centres across the country to be added to the scheme. 

For anyone who would like to learn more about the Magdalene Laundries and the Campaign for Justices, make sure to visit the Justice for Magdalene Research website.

The book can be purchased from a number of places including Dubray, Easons, Amazon and Waterstones. For more information on the authors and/or the book, click here.

From L to R: Colm O’Gorman, Lyndsay Rehn, Mary Harney and Maeve O’Rourke

Professor John D Feerick conferred with honorary Degree of Doctor of Law

Professor John D Feerick (centre) with (left to right) Dr Niamh Howlin, Professor Imelda Maher and Professor Mark Rogers

The Acting President of UCD, Professor Mark Rogers, along with the Dean of Law, Dr Niamh Howlin, congratulated Professor John D Feerick on the occasion of the conferring of an honorary Degree of Doctor of Law.  Professor Imelda Maher, former Dean of Law, delivered an inspiring citation at a conferring ceremony held in the Moot Court at the Sutherland School of Law on 14 June 2022.  Professor Feerick's family and friends, students from Fordham Law School, Queen’s University Belfast and UCD Sutherland School of Law, UCD faculty and members of the judiciary were in attendance.
Professor Maher summarised Professor Feerick’s many achievements and the extraordinary work that he has undertaken across his stellar career. Professor Feerick is an Irish-American with an outstanding sense of public service whose scholarship informed the drafting and adoption of the 25th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Later, as Dean of Fordham Law School, Professor Feerick participated in the first visit by a United States President to Northern Ireland, which was a seminal moment in the peace process that culminated in the Belfast Agreement. He first instigated a conflict resolution programme for Northern Ireland based in Fordham and, with the support of Professors John Jackson and Paul O’Connor, set up the Fordham/Queens University and University College Dublin Law Summer School which is now in its 21st year.

Click here for a copy of the Introductory address by Professor Imelda Maher

2022 Matheson | UCD Leadership Series Crypto and the Digital Assets Revolution: What’s Next?

(L to R) Michael Jackson, Managing Partner, Matheson, and Dr Niamh Howlin, Dean of Law, UCD Sutherland School of Law

On 11 May 2022, leading Irish law firm Matheson together with UCD Sutherland School of Law hosted a hybrid conference titled “Crypto and the Digital Assets Revolution: What’s Next?” at the O’Reilly Hall in UCD.

Dr Niamh Howlin, Dean of Law at UCD Sutherland School of Law, provided opening remarks and the keynote address was delivered by UCD alumna John Whelan, Managing Director, Crypto & Digital Assets at Banco Santander. The conference was comprised of panel discussions and conversations that reflected on the regulatory issues and the increasing significance of the FinTech sector in UCD’s graduate and undergraduate curriculum. 

Dr Howlin said; "The increasing significance of this area is reflected on our undergraduate and graduate curriculum. UCD now offers modules on Cryptocurrencies, Digital Finance, International Finance and Fintech.  These are cross-disciplinary areas requiring deep collaboration and engagement between academics from different fields and those who work in industry."

The discussions featured key UCD alumni within the industry and the regulatory environment (including Professor Joyce O’Connor, Founding President of National College of Ireland and Co-founder of Block W) together with members of Matheson’s dedicated FinTech team, senior executives from the international financial services industry, and addressed the opportunities, challenges and potential for Irish business in the area of blockchain, cryptocurrency and virtual assets.

Snapshot polls that were conducted at the event found that:

• Nearly 60% of respondents have already bought, or would consider buying crypto assets
• 97% believe that the difference between digital currencies and digital assets is not widely understood by the public.
• The vast majority (86%) believe that new regulation is essential for the widespread adoption of new products and services.
• In order to trust new technology, the most important consideration is having a greater understanding (62%), followed by data security and privacy (31.5%).

Delivering the closing address, Managing Partner of Matheson, Michael Jackson said; “I want to thank our speakers and panellists for their insightful and very interesting inputs.  The clear messages which we heard today are that the pace of change in this area is fast, the use cases for blockchain and crypto assets are evolving quickly and that regulation and legislation will need to evolve at a faster pace to reflect the impact of this. It was also clear that there is a real desire and need for more education about the technologies, opportunities and risks and that businesses, consumers and regulators need to continue to have dialogue and to share experiences to continue to build trust and to ensure that regulation continues to be targeted at the right risks in an appropriate way.”

Histories of Probation in Ireland: A Theoretical Analysis

(L to R): Gerry McNally, Deirdre Healy, Louise Kennefick, Nicola Carr, and His Honour Judge John O Connor

The UCD Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development (ACJRD) co-hosted a seminar “Histories of Probation in Ireland: A Theoretical Analysis”.  This event was held on the 25 April 2022 in the UCD Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, was chaired by His Honour Judge John O'Connor, Judge of the Circuit Court.    

The Histories of Probation project, which is funded by the Fitzpatrick Family Foundation, is the first of its kind to produce a history of Irish probation from the perspective of core stakeholders, namely administrators, probation officers, and clients, as well as archival records. This seminar focused on the perspectives of people under probation supervision from the 1980s to the present day. By shedding new light on the experience of supervision and the narratives underpinning probation practice, their accounts challenge received wisdom about the history of probation in Ireland.

SPEAKERS:

Dr Deirdre Healy, Director of the UCD Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Dr Louise Kennefick, Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law, University of Glasgow

RESPONDENTS:

Dr Nicola Carr, Professor in Criminology, University of Nottingham

Gerry McNally, Assistant Director, The Probation Service, and President, Confederation of European Probation (CEP)

(Lto R): Ian O'Donnell, Mark Wilson (Director, Probation Service), Alison Coyne

Maura Butler (ACJRD), with Louise Kennefick and Deirdre Healy

Lord Hendy focuses on P&O Ferries for the 2022 Guest Lecture in Employment Law 

Lord John Hendy Guest Speaker

We were delighted to welcome the renowned employment lawyer, Lord John Hendy to deliver the Distinguished Guest Lecture in Employment Law 2022. The Lecture is an integral part of the School's Professional Diploma in Employment Law. Previous speakers include Professors Bernd Waas (Frankfurt), Catherine Barnard (Cambridge), Claire Kilpatrick (European University Institute), Jeremias Prassl (Oxford), Mark Bell (TCD) and Keith Ewing (King's College London). This year's lecture was delivered by Lord John Hendy QC, who is recognised as "the leading silk at the Employment Bar", on the topic of "P&O Ferries and Labour Law". 

 Guests at the reception that followed the lecture

A recording of Lord Hendy’s lecture can be viewed here.

Lord Hendy described how, and why, P&O Ferries, on 17 March 2022, dismissed 786 officers and crews on their ferries operating from and to the UK. They were replaced with agency crews from India and the Philippines on much lower wages and far worse terms and conditions of employment. This breached long-standing collective agreements and was done without any prior consultation with the seafarers' trade unions. Lord Hendy described why there was no legal remedy by which the unions or their members could prevent this and pointed out that UK law also prevented the unions from taking any industrial action, in particular "solidarity action", to protect their members' jobs. His conclusion was that UK labour law "failed utterly to protect the jobs, incomes, careers and industrial voice" of these workers.

 The 2022 Diploma in Employment Law class with Lord Hendy and Tony Kerr SC

Lord Sumption delivers the 2022 John M. Kelly lecture to a large audience in UCD Sutherland School of Law

UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to welcome Lord Johnathan Sumption to deliver the 2022 John M. Kelly Memorial Lecture in late March. Our distinguished alumnus, the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell introduced Lord Sumption on the evening. The Chief Justice is a former student of John Kelly’s from UCD and also delivered a lecture in the series in 2016. Dr Niamh Howlin, Dean of Law began the evening’s proceedings by welcoming the Chief Justice, the Kelly Family and the audience in attendance

Lord Sumption is a former senior British judge, an accomplished author and medieval historian. He served as a Justice of the UK Supreme Court from 2012 to 2018. He has written several books of Medieval history and four books on the Hundred Years War.  ‘The European Union and the Nation-state’ was the topic of Lord Sumption’s talk for the lecture. There was a very large audience in attendance to hear Lord Sumption speak on this highly topical subject and deliver an extremely wide ranging and interesting lecture. 

The audience of academics, students, practitioners and members of the judiciary included members of Professor John M. Kelly’s family.   Guests at the lecture included many notable alumni including the Attorney General, Mr Paul Gallagher and Senator Michael McDowell. The lecture honours the memory of Professor Kelly, (1931-1991) who was Professor of Jurisprudence and editor of the Irish Jurist as well as a government Minister and Attorney General.

A recording of the lecture will be available to view on this site shortly.

(L to R) Lord Sumption, Dr Niamh Howlin  and Chief Justice, Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell

(L to R) Mr Justice Brian Murray of the Supreme Court with Ms Justice Úna Ní Raifeartaigh of the Court of Appeal

(L to R) Mr Michael McNamara TD, Senator Michael McDowell and Mr Ciaran O'Meara

Chief Justice Launches UCD Student Legal Services Journal 2022

On Wednesday 6th April the launch of the UCD Student Legal Service Journal 2022 was held at the Sutherland School of Law. The Launch’s keynote speech was provided by the Chief Justice of Ireland, the Hon. Mr. Justice Donal O’Donnell, who also kindly contributed the foreword to this year’s Journal. Addresses were also given by Prof. Gavin Barrett of the Sutherland School of Law and Mr Edward McCann of Mediahuis. The Journal was kindly sponsored by the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent Newspapers.

From the left Students Jessica Commins and Joseph Boyle with The Hon. Mr Justice Donal O'Donnell, Chief Justice

The Journal is an entirely student-run publication with thirteen sub-editors and twenty-six contributors ranging from first year to masters level, led by Editors-in-Chief Jessica Commins (Law with History Stage 4) and Joseph Boyle (Law with Politics Stage 4).  This year's Journal explores the theme of 100 Years of the Irish State, marking the centenary of Irish independence. Contributors reflected on the successes and challenges of the Irish legal system over the past century, engaging with topics of domestic and international interest, including the development of child protection law in Ireland, comparisons of Irish and UK asylum reception systems and Ireland’s role on the UN Security Council. The online edition of the Journal can be accessed at https://bit.ly/3DSfrmn.

Title: The Rt. Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman Vincent Keaveny visits UCD Sutherland School of Law

The UCD Sutherland School of Law was honoured to host an event on Thursday, March 3, with UCD BCL '86 alumnus, the Rt Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman Vincent Keaveny who discussed some key priorities of his ‘People and Purpose’ mayoral theme with RTÉ broadcaster and fellow UCD Alumni Awardee in Law, Miriam O'Callaghan BCL '79.

From left to right: RTÉ broadcast journalist Miriam O'Callaghan, the Rt the Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman Vincent Keaveny and Dr. Niamh Howlin, Dean of UCD Sutherland School of Law

The discussion titled ‘Opening up the Marketplace: Getting more diverse talent into the financial and professional services professions’ was a wide-ranging interview followed by questions from the audience. The Lord Mayor began by reflecting on his time at UCD as a student and described his experiences as he progressed as a law graduate and prominent commercial city lawyer to the Mansion House.  He also referred to the late Peter Sutherland whose father imparted the following sage life advice, which was “if you’re on the pitch and the ball lands at your feet, kick it!” meaning ‘take the opportunities as they come’.

A law student asking a question during the Q&A session

The Lord Mayor offered insightful perspectives on the issues around social mobility and ideas on what people in the financial and professional industry can do to improve this.

“In the financial and professional services, despite research showing a positive business impact with a more diverse organisation, research also shows that people hired from a low socioeconomic background progress 25% slower.”

“Universities play a really critical role because that’s the point at which people begin to build up those networks that are really important and begin to think about the issues they’ll have to address to navigate through careers. I’m a huge fan, for instance, of mentoring.  It’s a really important aspect of progression within the professional and financial services.”

In attendance were UCD Sutherland School of Law students, faculty, friends of the School and members of the Lord Mayor’s BCL class of 1986. The Q&A also covered approaches to promoting greater diversity and demystifying a career in law both at schools’ level and within the profession.

From left to right: BCL' 86 graduates David Foley, Suzanne Egan, the Rt. Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Alderman Vincent Keaveny and Aisling Sweeney.

To watch the full recording, please click here.

UCD Law hosts Student Event on The European Strategic Autonomy with Admiral Mellett (ret.) and Colone Dirou.

The UCD Sutherland School of Law was honoured to host a student event on The European Strategic Autonomy: Crossed Perspectives with guest speakers Admiral Mellett, former Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces, and Colonel Dirou, Deputy Head of Defence Strategy, French Ministry of the Armed Forces.

The issue of conflicts worldwide, and more implicit conflicts affecting Europe, implies a broad understanding of how societies and countries interact, including how they view the use of their armed forces and to understand how governments and societies perceive the role of their defence forces in the face of the different threats (e.g., climate change threat, terrorist threats, traditional security threats etc.). Against this backdrop, several questions arise in the EU context. Does the EU have the means to ensure its security? What could be the role of the EU in respect of the Member States’ sovereignty? How can the EU encourage its citizens to feel more concerned about their security? What are the common threats?

Admiral Mark Mellett (ret.) and Colonel Armel Dirou offered insightful perspectives on these strategic issues. The Q&A with students covered a wide range of issues in relation to the actual fleshing out of the EU strategic autonomy in view of different challenges (climate crisis and migrant crisis). Questions about the articulation of the EU defence and security strategy and the role of NATO as well as the issue of the neutrality of Ireland were also discussed. Professor Ben Tonra, UCD Professor of International Relations at UCD School of Politics and International Relations, offered the concluding remarks touching upon the sovereignty and responsibility of member states.

Left to right: Col. Filser, Adm. Mellett (ret.), H.E. Guérend, Dr. Paris, Prof. Moore-Cherry, and Col. Dirou.

This was a timely discussion given the latest developments about defence. See also the interview of the French Ambassador H.E. Vincent Guérend here.

In attendance were UCD students in Law and in Political Science, students from other universities, as well as a number of other participants including the US and UK Military Attachés.

Adm. Mellett (ret.) delivering his address

The event was sponsored by the Embassy of France in Ireland and the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law (College Strategic Funding Scheme). It was organised by Dr. Marie-Luce Paris, UCD Sutherland School of Law, and Colonel Nicolas Filser, French Defence Attaché in Ireland.

Note that this event took place on 24 January 2022, after the lifting of most Covid restrictions.

Report for NI Charity Regulation Review published 

The Minister for Communities commissioned a Review of Charity Regulation in NI, led by an Independent Panel, which commenced on 25 January 2021. The Panel was chaired by Dr Oonagh B. Breen, Professor of Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin.  Dr Breen was ably assisted by Rev Dr Lesley Carroll, Prisoner Ombudsman NI and Noel Lavery, former Permanent Secretary in the NI Civil Service.

The Review considered the Charities Act (NI) 2008 and the roles of the Charity Commission NI and the Department thereunder. The full Terms of Reference can be found here. In particular, it was tasked with examining whether the Commission’s performance within the existing legal framework struck the right balance, in light of best practice, between supporting charities to do the right thing and deterring, or dealing with misconduct. 

The Panel undertook a very comprehensive and inclusive engagement process and has delivered its Review Report with 93 recommendations on changes that could be considered to improve the delivery of services and the operation of the regulatory framework.   The Minister is considering the recommendations and the Department will publish its response and Action Plan in the coming weeks.

You can read the Independent Panel’s full report and recommendations here [https://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/publications/independent-review-charity-regulation] 

UCD Law Students Refugee Law Mooting Success

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates four of our final year students who have progressed to the oral rounds of the International Migration and Refugee Law Moot Court Competition which takes place in Ghent in March 2022.   Jessica Commins, Jane Douglas, Kate Miller and Larisa Mirt achieved an excellent result based on their extensive written pleadings, engaging with complex arguments on entitlement to refugee status. The UCD Law team are one of twelve teams invited to Ghent to participate in the oral rounds, from an exceptionally competitive field of forty teams from twenty-three countries.

The team’s coaches for this mooting competition are Cillian Bracken BL and Dr Liam Thornton.

UCD School of Law wishes Jessica, Jane, Kate and Larisa the very best of luck in the oral rounds of this prestigious moot competition.

From left to right: Jesscia Commins (Law with History), Jane Douglas (Law with Social Justice), Kate Miller (Law with Social Justice), Larisa Mirt (Law with Philosophy) 

Major Conference on Philanthropy hosted by UCD Sutherland School of Law

The UCD Sutherland School of Law was honoured to welcome the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) recently for its 10th international conference.  Professor Oonagh Breen was responsible for this prestigious conference ably supported by a team of colleagues from TCD, Philanthropy Ireland, the Irish Red Cross and the University of Kent and the UCD Sutherland School. 

The two-day Conference, whose theme was “Building bridges in the aftermath of Covid-19: Where will the philanthropy of today lead us tomorrow?” brought together leading European and US scholars in the fields of non-profit scholarship and a wider cohort of key stakeholders in philanthropy. It attracted more than 100 delegates who presented over 70 papers and panels with two keynote plenary sessions on the themes of defending and growing philanthropy. ERNOP’s day-long PhD workshop enabled the next generation of European (and UCD) non-profit scholars to learn from their peers.

While rising covid numbers resulted in the conference switching from an in-person gathering to a virtual platform at the eleventh hour, delegates still enjoyed a warm Irish welcome. Minister Joe O’Brien opened the conference and Professor Breen worked closely with the Dept of Rural and Community Development to facilitate the holding of a pre-conference policy workshop on the development of a national policy on philanthropy, which greatly benefitted from the insights and contributions of European colleagues.  

 Pictured is Keynote Speaker, Rhodri Davies, a recognised expert on philanthropy and civil society issues.

Immigrant Lawyer Fiona McEntee receives 2021 UCD Alumni Award in Law

UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to honour Fiona McEntee as this year’s recipient for the UCD Alumni Award in Law. The virtual celebration was hosted by Pat Kenny and took place on Thursday, 18 November 2021.

A recording of Fiona McEntee in conversation with Pat Kenny can be viewed here. Fiona McEntee is an award-winning, nationally recognised immigration attorney who graduated from UCD with a BCL in 2005. 

Fiona is also the Chair of the Media & Advocacy Committee for AILA National, the bar association with over 15,000 immigration lawyer members. She regularly appears on national/international media including MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, BBC, and RTÉ. She also counsels other immigration attorneys about leveraging the media to fiercely advocate for clients.

Fiona has won many awards including the ISBA Elmer Gertz Award and the Chicago-Kent College of Law Outstanding Pro Bono Service Award (O’Hare Airport Attorneys -Muslim Travel Ban). In 2019, Fiona was inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame in the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago.

Last year, Fiona wrote and published her first book – Our American Dream – a children’s book on immigration. As a mom of two young children, an immigrant, and an immigration lawyer who fights for justice every day, she wrote Our American Dream to explain the importance of a diverse and welcoming America.

We are delighted to be able to share some thoughts from Fiona where she remembers her time in UCD while offering some very inspiring advice to our current students. 

What does UCD mean to you now? “I was one of the first in my family to go to the third level. I’ve such happy memories of UCD – the friends I met there I still have to this day. I learned so much that still informs my work.”

What aspects of your work do you enjoy most? “I’m proud of being able to use my voice to advocate for others. I have huge privilege as an educated white Irish immigrant and an immigration lawyer.”

What achievements are you most proud of? “I feel like we have a responsibility to influence the narrative of immigration to the US. I am proud of that work. I also wrote a children’s book on immigration.”

How significantly has your work been affected by the pandemic? “It had a huge impact. Everything was shut down. There were no Green Card interviews, no visa appointments, there were travel bans. On a personal note, it’s been difficult. My cousin, who was like a brother to me, passed away from cancer last May and I haven’t been able to return to Dublin.” 

What advice do you have for new graduates? “Find work you are passionate about. Life is too short to do work that does not satisfy you. Social media can be a good tool, but be wary of what you say on it.”

Fourteen Law Students Awarded Medals at Bank of Ireland Prize Giving

On 25 November 2021 we honoured the top students across the four years of the UCD Law undergraduate programmes at the Bank of Ireland Awards. The medals awarded this year were for the academic year 2019/2020 and these awards continue a tradition started in 1976.  We were particularly honoured to welcome Bank of Ireland Finance as the sponsors of the awards this year and are grateful to Managing Director, Mr Derek McDermott, for his support of UCD Sutherland School of Law and our students.

The awards include prizes for a Tort Essay for students in Stage 1 and this year the adjudicator was Mr Justice David Barniville of the Court of Appeal who is himself a past prize-winner.  This is now the fourtieth year of the competition being adjudicated by a distinguished member of the Judiciary and we are very grateful for their continued support and involvement.

Mr Justice Barniville spoke eloquently to the assembled group of students and their families.  His talk was both inspiring and amusing where he related some interesting personal anecdotes from his judicial career.  While it was disappointing that the event had to take place virtually this year and the students didn't have the opportunity to meet the judge in person, Mr Justice Barniville's contribution made the event enjoyable for all.

We would like to congratulate the following students on their outstanding achievements in the academic year 2019/2020:

Level I Tort Essay

First Place - Gold Medal: Juliette Bertola

Second Place - Silver Medal: David Egan

Third Place- Bronze Medal: Fionán Minogue

Stage II Medal Winners

First Place - Gold Medal: Killian Farrelly

Second Place - Silver Medal: Emily Cahill

Third Place - Bronze Medals: Joseph Aherne & Kate Kilcommins

Stage III Medal Winners

First Place - Gold Medals:  Stephen Connolly & Neasa Ni Bheaglaoich

Third Place - Bronze Medal: Elizabeth Higgins

Stage IV Medal Winners

First Place - Gold Medal: Sean Dillon

Second Place - Silver Medal: Joanne Johnston

Third Place - Bronze Medals: Cillian Madden & Tom O'Moore

(Note: For the Tort Essay, entry was open to all stages of law students studying the Tort Module. The prizes for 2nd. 3rd & 4th Law were awarded to the top students for their overall performance across all law programmes).

These students join a distinguished group of UCD Law Alumni who were past award winners. These include our Dean, Dr Niamh Howlin, and no less than seven of our current faculty. Other prize-winners include leading lawyers such as Ms Aedamar Comiskey, Senior Partner and Chair of Linklaters, and many members of the judiciary such as Judge Siofra O’Leary, Vice-President of the European Court of Human Rights, Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly of the Court of Appeal and High Court Judges Mr Justice Paul Coffey, Mr Justice Brian Cregan and Mr Justice Richard Humphreys.  

The staff of UCD Sutherland School of Law warmly congratulates the 2019/2020 award winning students for their hard work and outstanding achievements.

Professor Imelda Maher appointed Fellow at New York University

Congratulations to Professor Imelda Maher, MRIA who has been appointed the Emile Noel GlobalFellow  at the Jean Monnet Center, New York University School of Law from January to June 2022.  

While a Fellow at the Center, Professor Maher will undertake research on law and hope, focusing on the preamble and early provisions of the Treaty of the European Union.  The EU has experienced several crises in the last decade: the fiscal and banking crises; the migration crisis; and the rule of law crisis that has highlighted the limited ability of the EU to respond to the degradation of the rule of law.  In addition, Brexit was a political shock which had the unexpected consequence of harnessing solidarity among remaining Member States and the economic and geo-political implications of which will be played out over time. While much has been written on these crises, two major themes have emerged in legal scholarship: the rule of law and trust.  This project will add to these discussions by analysing what is the nature of the relationship between law and hope.  It does so in the context of the current Conference on the Future of Europe and the prospect of treaty revision where change can be viewed as aspirational or aversive.  At moments of constitutional change through treaty-reform, how important is hope to EU Law?

UCD Masters Students take part in the 2022 Helga Pedersen Moot Court Competition

Three Masters students have taken the opportunity to take part in the 10^th edition of the Helga Pedersen Moot Court Competition. The Competition provides a unique opportunity for students to experience the principles and implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights firsthand and simulates the procedures of complaints to the Strasbourg Court. The Competition is coordinated by ELSA International in partnership with The Council of Europe, The European Court of Human Rights, and the European Human Rights Association.

Ayomide Adebambo, Sarah Devaney, and Lyn Schwarzhaupt are all Masters students in Law who took the Law of the ECHR course led by Dr Marie-Luce Paris. They are interested in developing their skills and their knowledge of the ECHR system. The case they are working on is a combination of environmental law and human rights. Considering her research work in both fields, Alessandra Accogli (UCD Ad Astra PhD Candidate) is coaching the team.

We wish them all the best of luck with their submissions and during the Competition’s rounds!

(L to R) Alessandra Accogli,  Lyn Schwarzhaupt, Ayomide Adebambo and Sarah Devaney

Dr Cliona Kelly receives 2021 'UCD Values in Action Award'

Congratulations to our colleague, Associate Dean, Cliona Kelly, who has been awarded one of the ten UCD Values in Action Awards for 2021.

Now in their fourth year, the Values in Action (VIA) awards celebrate individuals or teams/committees who act as ambassadors for the UCD Values through their daily work, volunteering or establishing initiatives. This year's recipients were awarded for bringing UCD’s shared values of Collegiality, Creativity, Diversity, Engagement, Excellence and Integrity to life.

Dr Kelly was nominated by the Dean of Law, Dr Niamh Howlin, in recognition of her efforts to provide sexual wellbeing education for students. 

In 2019, the Department of Education launched a framework aimed at the creation of an institutional campus culture which is safe, respectful and supportive. This was developed in recognition of the sexual violence problem in the Irish higher education sector.  Dr Kelly, acting on foot of this framework, and realising that institutional reactions can be slow compared with small-scale interventions, has been working to provide sexual wellbeing education for law students. Her Consent Workshops are integrated into the curriculum on a core module for first year law students.

Conscious of the need for such initiatives to be student-led, Cliona has supported the Students’ Union and Student Law Society in hosting and promoting an Image-Based Sexual Abuse workshop and an awareness-raising campaign. In addition, Law students are also asked to read the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act as part of an exercise in ‘how to read legislation’ on the LAW10420 module. This integrates a discussion about Image-Based Sexual Abuse into the undergraduate Law curriculum.

Cliona has voluntarily put a lot of time and effort into developing these resources and supports. From 2020-2021 she undertook significant training in her own time, collaborating with relevant groups such as Active Consent. She voluntarily took the initiative to integrate aspects of the sexual wellbeing education into the curriculum, which has now embedded this important topic in the Law School curriculum for the future.

Among other values, Cliona is being recognised for her engagement, creativity and collegiality. Her colleagues join with the Dean in congratulating her on her outstanding work for the wellbeing of all UCD law students.

Details of the other recipients of these awards are available here.

Ad Astra Fellows, UCD Sutherland School of Law

UCD Sutherland School of Law is delighted to announce that we are currently seeking applications for Ad Astra Fellows - closing date, 14 February 2022.

These roles are being created in support of the 2024 University College Dublin Strategic Plan 'Rising to the Future' where UCD has set the target to increase faculty numbers by 500 over five years.

With an initial 5-year contract, research support for these 5 years, and the opportunity for an on-going contract subject to performance, there has never been a better time to join the faculty at Ireland's Global University and to live in one of Europe's most vibrant, friendly and connected capital cities.

UCD Sutherland School of Law is ranked in the top 100 Law Schools in the QS World University rankings. The School’s distinctive mission is to support and lead on the transformative potential of law for contemporary societies. The School is home to several research Centres and groups, and three major European Research Council (ERC) projects. It has an increasingly international focus and impact, and is recognised for the quality of its research both within Law and across disciplines. The Sutherland School of Law offers a range of undergraduate and graduate degree programmes to a diverse cohort of students.

Prior to application, further information (including application procedure) should be obtained from the UCD Ad Astra Fellow website: http://www.ucd.ie/adastrafellows/

Closing date: 17.00hrs (Local Irish Time) on 14th February 2022. Apply now at the following link.   

UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP BURSARIES

The UCD Sutherland School of Law is now inviting applications for the UCD Sutherland Opportunity Supported by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Bursaries from undergraduate and graduate law students at the School. 

Incoming exchange students are not eligible to apply for these bursaries (although incoming BCL/Maitrise students are eligible to apply). Students who have previously applied for a bursary - whether successfully or unsuccessfully - are very welcome to apply again. Also students already in receipt of Cothram na Féinne scholarships as part of UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP are welcome to apply for bursaries.

This very generous bursary scheme is funded by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP and is designed to support UCD law students who face a financial challenge in continuing their undergraduate studies, or in participating in ERASMUS and international exchange programmes, or in taking up an internship at an NGO/non-commercial entity as part of the BCL Internship module (LAW37680), or in pursuing graduate study at UCD Sutherland School of Law.

All applications must be completed online. Students will only be asked for supporting documentation at a later date if they are shortlisted for a bursary. Applicants must supply their UCDConnect email address and student number on the form.

The closing date for applications is Friday 10 December 2021 at 5pm

(Please note that if you don't see the form it may be that you need to sign into your Google/UCD connect account. If you are on an Apple device, you may need to use another browser other than Safari)

https://forms.gle/wokw9NhPBYYoSWb66

Sutherland Fellow in French Law 2021/22 – French Public Law II

Sutherland School of Law of University College Dublin (UCD) is looking to appoint a Sutherland Fellow in French Law from January to June 2022 to teach French Public Law II (Introduction to Administrative Law) to second year students enrolled in its BCL with French Law and Dual Degree BCL/Maîtrise programmes. The students enrolled in this module are a relatively small group and are very motivated and eager to learn.

The delivery of the module would have to be mostly face-to-face at UCD Belfield campus (some small degree of online delivery could be considered). The specific timetable and delivery details would be agreed with the successful candidate and subject to wider timetabling constraints and public health guidelines.

Applications are invited from candidates with expertise in French Public Law and able to teach in French language, while also being able to communicate and occasionally explain concepts in English. The successful applicant would preferably have a PhD (or be close to completing one), or have substantial professional experience in the subject matter. Interest/experience in teaching French legal methodology and in handling highly diverse groups of students (e.g. with different cultural, language and national backgrounds) is desirable.

The position is temporary for the Academic Year 2021/22, but continuity beyond this academic year may be considered. Remuneration for teaching and marking will be in line with UCD rates for occasional lecturers and with intern examiner rates, respectively.

We welcome applications from everyone, including those who identify with any of the protected characteristics that are set out in our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy. The university adheres to a range of equality, diversity and inclusion policies. We encourage applicants to consult UCD’s equality, diversity and inclusion policies here.

Applications: Interested applicants should send a one-page cover letter and CV as a one single pdf document by email to law.office@ucd.ie indicating in the subject: “Sutherland Fellow in French Law 2021/22”.

Deadline: The closing date for receipt of completed applications is 17:00 on 29th November 2021.

Further information: For queries, please contact Dr Sara Benedí Lahuerta (sara.benedilahuerta@ucd.ie).

Legal History Research Group publishes new book

The Legal History Research Group is delighted to have published its latest book: Law and Religion in Ireland 1700-1970 (Palgrave Macmillan) . The book is edited by Dr Niamh Howlin and Dr Kevin Costello, and includes chapters by several members of the research group, including Dr Tom Mohr, Dr Ivar McGrath and Dr Emma Lyons. It also includes a chapter by our recently deceased colleague Professor Nial Osborough.

This book builds on a roundtable workshop hosted in the School of Law in 2017. It focuses, from a legal perspective, on a series of events which make up some of the principal episodes in the legal history of religion in Ireland: the anti-Catholic penal laws of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; the shift towards the removal of disabilities from Catholics and dissenters; the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; and the place of religion, and the Catholic Church, under the Constitutions of 1922 and 1937.

Applications Sought for Newman Fellowship at UCD Sutherland School of Law

UCD Sutherland School of Law is delighted to announce details of a new legal Fellowship, established with the generous support of our alumnus Ronan P. Harty:

‘The Ronan Harty Newman Fellowship in New Frontiers of Competition Law’ 

This Fellowship is part of a programme in UCD to provide postdoctoral research opportunities for scholars of proven academic excellence. This Fellowship will be based in UCD Sutherland School of Law. The School is widely recognised for the quality of research produced, the degree programmes offered and the wider impact it creates in Ireland and internationally. Three European Research Council projects are currently hosted in the School which has a vibrant community of early career and established researchers.

Full details on this Fellowship and the application process are available at the following link: https://www.ucdfoundation.ie/ronan-harty-newman-fellowship-new-frontiers-competition-law/Note: The application deadline is 5pm IST on 12 November 2021.

This Fellowship in UCD Sutherland School of Law is supported by Ronan P. Harty (pictured), a partner in the antitrust group at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City.  There Mr Harty provides general antitrust counselling to U.S. and non-U.S. companies and represents clients in enforcement agency investigations, domestic and cross-border acquisitions and joint ventures, and litigations.

He joined Davis Polk in 1986 and became a partner in 1994.  In 1991, he was based in Brussels as an assistant (stagiaire) in the cabinet of Sir Leon Brittan, Vice President of the European Commission Responsible for Competition Policy.

Mr. Harty graduated with a BCL (1st Class Honours) from UCD in 1984.  He received an LL.M from the University of Michigan Law School in 1986.

Ronan serves on the board of Legal Services NYC.

Mentors Sought for UCD Law Students

If you are a UCD law graduate, you are an inspiration and a role model for our students at the UCD Sutherland School of Law. Your advice can help current law students to achieve their ambitions. The UCD Career Mentoring Programme provides students with the opportunity to meet and network with professional mentors who are able to offer support in developing their career ideas, clarifying their goals and improving their employability. We are currently looking for alumni to volunteer as mentors for UCD Law students.

How does it work? The mentor/mentee matching process is student-led and online via our UCD Alumni Network. Student mentees will review this information to consider matches. Both alumni and students will be trained and supported to navigate this process.
What’s involved for alumni mentors:
– As a mentor you will join an online community of fellow UCD alumni career mentors.
– We provide training and support to ensure both alumni and students are confident to make the most of the mentoring relationship.
– Once matched, mentoring sessions can take place online, by telephone, or face-to-face where public health guidelines allow.

Time commitment:
– Apart from preparatory work including setting up an online profile and attending a mentor briefing session, this programme will take place from January 2022 until June 2022)
– Student mentees will make direct requests to be mentored during the 'matching window' (10-21 January 2022).
– All participants will be invited to attend an important 'Meet your Mentor' event on 8 February 2022.
– Once you have approved the best match for you, we ask that you meet at least 3 times in 5 months (February - June).

Learn more & Register Today Here

If you have any further questions, please email alumnivolunteer@ucd.ie.

Alumnus Vincent Keaveny appointed Lord Mayor of the City of London

Vincent Keaveny pictured at the 2018 UCD Alumni Awards

Congratulations to our alumnus, Vincent Keaveny who was recently elected the 693rd Lord Mayor of the City of London. As the elected head of the City of London Corporation, he will serve as a global ambassador for the UK-based financial and professional services industry from November 2021 for a one-year term. At the Lord Mayor's banquet he delivered a very inspiring speech which can be viewed at this link.

Vincent has been a great advocate and supporter of UCD Sutherland School of Law. He holds a BCL degree from UCD and was the recipient of our prestigious Law Alumnus of the Year award in 2018. The following year he kindly hosted a group of UCD Law students on a tour of the ‘Old Bailey’, London’s Central Criminal Court and he continues to be very engaged with the School of Law.

As Lord Mayor, Vincent – a partner in the international business law firm, DLA Piper – will act as an international spokesperson for the City, leading business delegations to key international markets on behalf of the UK’s financial and professional services industry.

In the role, he will meet government representatives from around the world alongside business leaders and policymakers both in the UK and beyond.  During his Mayoral year, Alderman Keaveny will also look to promote his ‘People and Purpose’ agenda, championing a purpose-led and people-focused UK financial and professional services sector.

Vincent Keaveny said:

“I am honoured to be elected as the 693rd Lord Mayor of the City of London at such a critical time. The City will play a key role in addressing some of the major issues of today: supporting the recovery, making the most of talented people across the country and tackling climate change”.

(With thanks to the following website for content for this story: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/)

Three Doctoral candidates awarded Irish Research Council Scholarships

(L to R) Rachel Claire Brady, Jamie McLoughlin, Alison Coyne

Congratulations to Rachel Claire Brady, Jamie Mc Loughlin and Alison Coyne on their scholarship awards from the Irish Research Council. Rachel Claire Brady and Jamie McLoughlin were both awarded Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarships and Alison Coyne, the Employment-Based Postgraduate Scholarship.

Rachel Claire Brady’s PhD research is supervised by Dr Cliona Kelly and examines the role of morality in the regulation of patents and trademarks in Europe. This project takes a novel approach to this issue, applying social science methodology and stakeholder engagement.

Rachel completed her Undergraduate degree in Dublin City University followed by an LLM in Intellectual Property Law in UCD.  She then qualified and practised as an Irish and EU Trademark Attorney in Ireland’s biggest intellectual property law firm. Upon completing her PhD, Rachel hopes to marry her practical experience with her academic training to continue researching and addressing problems in the practice of Intellectual Property law in Europe.

Jamie McLoughlin’s research is supervised by Dr Suzanne Egan and explores the right to life in Irish constitutional law from a comparative constitutional and human rights perspective. His research focuses, in particular, on the potential meaning(s) of the concept of ‘life’ protected by the right to life.

Jamie obtained his undergraduate law degree from UCD Sutherland School of Law and his master’s degree in human rights law and constitutional theory from the University of Oxford. He has previously worked in the Office of the Attorney General of Ireland as a legal researcher where he assisted in the preparation of legal advice for Government departments and the drafting of legislation. After finishing his PhD, Jamie wishes to research and teach as a lecturer in the areas of human rights and constitutional law.

Alison Coyne’s PhD research is supervised by Professor Ian O’Donnell and assesses whether the needs of young adult offenders, who transition from the Irish Youth Justice Service to custodial and non-custodial settings, are being met in Ireland. The project uses Kern’s EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Well-being to assess the needs of young adult offenders through semi-structured interviews.

Alison graduated from BCL Law with Politics in UCD in 2016 and LLM Criminology and Criminal Justice in UCD in 2018. She has completed the first 2 years of her PhD research on a part-time basis while working in A&L Goodbody. This employment-based scholarship has afforded Alison the opportunity to continue her research on a full-time basis in conjunction with Tallaght Probation Project. Upon completion of her PhD, Alison hopes to gain a position within an NGO or Governmental Department informing on youth justice and advocating for the rights of young adult offenders as a distinct cohort.

Dr Niamh Howlin appointed UCD Dean of Law

From September 2021, Dr Niamh Howlin will take over the role of Dean and Head of School in UCD Sutherland School of Law, succeeding Professor Imelda Maher who has been in the role since 2017.  Dr Howlin graduated with a BCL from UCD in 2003 and completed her doctoral studies in UCD in 2007, supervised by Professor Nial Osborough.  She is an Associate Professor and has worked in the School since 2013, having joined UCD from Queen's University Belfast where she taught for 5 years.

In her time in UCD, Dr Howlin has served in a number of different roles in the Law School, including as Associate Dean and Head of Teaching and Learning. In 2017 she received a College Teaching Excellence Award which are awarded to individual members of teaching staff for sustained commitment to teaching excellence and student learning. In 2018 she received a UCD Research Impact Case Study Award for her work on historical miscarriages of justice.  In one such case, her work was acknowledged by President Michael D. Higgins when he posthumously pardoned a man 136 years after he had been hanged for murder (https://www.ucd.ie/research/impact/researchimpact/case-studies/pdf/CASE_STUDY_Niamh_Howlin.pdf).

Dr Howlin teaches a number of subjects, including Property Law, Legal Skills and Jury Trials. She has published several books, articles and reports on aspects of legal history, court procedure and juries. Her most recent books are Law and Religion in Ireland 1700-1970 (with Dr Kevin Costello); Juries in Ireland: Laypersons and Law in the Long Nineteenth Century;  and Lyall on Land Law (with Dr Noel McGrath).  In 2020 she co-authored Judges and Juries in Ireland: An Empirical Study (With Dr Mark Coen, Dr Colette Barry and John Lynch).  She is currently working on a history of the Irish Bar.  Further details of Niamh's research can be viewed at: https://people.ucd.ie/niamh.howlin.

Five students from law programmes receive UCD President’s Awards

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates the five outstanding students from law programmes who received the President’s Award in recognition of their service to campus life.

There were seventeen UCD students in total awarded by the President for their "exemplary contributions” to student extracurricular activities, as well as their involvement with student organisations across the University in 2020/21. The School of Law is very proud that there were a total of five recipients from law programmes, making up a significant proportion of all of the UCD students recognised for these prestigious awards.  They were:

- Aisling Tully, (BCL) Law

- Brendan Lynch, (MCL) Masters of Common Law

- Joseph Walshe, (BBL) Business and Law

- Laura Kennedy, (BCL) Law with Social Justice

- Sarah McGee, (BCL) Law with Social Justice

The awards provide recognition for those who provide the leadership, commitment and energy that make UCD an exciting, dynamic and humane place to live, study and work. Recipients, typically, are actively engaged in service to UCD societies, clubs or the Students’ Union, or are involved in student support services or competitive activity in intervarsity events.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this year's awards were unable to be presented in person, with the annual ceremony usually held in O'Reilly Hall.

Receiving their award, recipients were thanked for their service to their fellow students, with their contributions recognised as having “been exemplary”.

Sarah McGee and Conor Cassidy win the Arthur Cox ‘Contribution to University Life’ Awards

Sarah McGee, (BCL) Law with Social Justice, and Conor Cassidy, (BBL) Business and Law, were recent recipients of the annual Arthur Cox ‘Contribution to University Life’ awards.  The awards honour the contribution of Law students to university life and this can be in sporting activities, student societies, initiatives to improve the university community or the relationship between the university and the wider community. 

The wide range of activities that Sarah McGee has undertaken alongside her studies are an excellent example of this commitment. For example, as co-editor of the Student Law Journal she was involved with changing the submission categories to make them more accessible and allow a broader range of subjects. This resulted in an increase in the number and diversity of submissions which included legal philosophy and feminist jurisprudence. She was also actively involved in the Student Legal Service and has acted as a judge at the UCD L&H Junior Schools Debating Competition. In addition to all of this, she has volunteered for charity fundraisers, has worked as a Student Ambassador and assisted at the Arthur Cox UCD Women in Leadership conference.  Sarah has also found the time to be a member of the UCD Philharmonic Choir and has performed with them in the National Concert Hall.

Fellow winner, Conor Cassidy, also made an outstanding contribution to his fellow students, and to the wider community, since coming to UCD. His work as co-convenor of the Leinster Junior Schools Debating Competition on behalf of UCD Law Society is an excellent example of this commitment.  In this role he actively sought to increase the diversity of voices at the event to encourage school students of all backgrounds to see that there is a pathway for them to university. During his time in UCD he was also secretary of the Student Legal Service, a Peer Mentor, UCD Badminton Club’s match secretary, an elected member of the Executive of the Athletic Union Council (UCD’s sporting body) and volunteered for a number of charity fundraising events.

Both outstanding students have demonstrated the kind of commitment consistent with the aims of this award from Arthur Cox Solicitors. These are to encourage students to avail fully of the opportunities that university offers them; to be innovators and catalysts for change; consistently to improve their community; increase their potential and contribute towards a sound society and a dynamic economy. 

UCD Law Graduate Robert Lee awarded a Lord Denning scholarship

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Robert Lee who has been awarded a Lord Denning scholarship from Lincoln's Inn supporting him to commence the English ICCA bar course in September 2021.  

Robert graduated in 2018 with a BCL (Law with Economics International). He followed his undergraduate degree by studying the BCL in Oxford. He currently works as a Government Legislation Adviser. 

Robert was an Ad Astra Academic Scholar while in UCD and won a number of prestigious prizes including the Decisis Hibernia ‘Law Ireland Dissenting Judgement’ Competition in 2018. He was also the winner of the McCann Fitzgerald ‘Law into Art’ Prize, the Butterworths Irish Law Gold and the Irish Tax Institute ‘Your Take on Tax’ Competition. He was Editor-in-Chief of the UCD Student Legal Service Law Review 2018 which was titled "80 Years of Bunreacht na hEireann"

We wish Robert every success in his future career.

2020 Law Graduate, Grace Oladipo, awarded Fulbright Scholarship

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Grace Oladipo who has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the University of Notre Dame. The Fulbright award winners were announced at a recent virtual event with Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney TD and Irish ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall. These prestigious awards give students, scholars and professionals in Ireland the opportunity to undertake postgraduate study, research and teaching in the United States.

As a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Grace will research the factors that influence overrepresentation of minority groups in prison populations, measures that facilitate the reintegration of ex-prisoners into society and the role of social entrepreneurship on the realisation of human rights. While in UCD Grace was the recipient of both the Arthur Cox Contribution to University Life Award and a UCD President’s Prize.

We asked Grace for details of her award and her recent activities:

‘I will be undertaking an LL.M in International Human Rights Law at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to this, I will be a Graduate Affiliate of the Klau Centre for Civil and Human Rights where I will work with experts in the human rights field to realise the human rights of others.

Since I graduated from UCD in 2020, I have been working and training at PwC as a Tax Associate. I also semi-volunteered at an organisation called the Global Purpose Enterprise which aims to support young black people globally through mentorship, practical workshops, and financial aid, as well as through employment. I also co-founded The Student Collective with Shekemi Denuga, a Ph.D student at UCD. The Student Collective seeks to provide support for leaving certificate students by pairing them with university students and equipping them through their Leaving Certificate journey.

I am really looking forward to starting my studies in America as a Fulbright and a George Moore Scholar.’

Dr Joe McGrath, Assistant Professor in UCD Sutherland School of Law has also secured a prestigious Fulbright award for the academic year, 2021-2022. He will take up a coveted research role as a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley.

‘The Offences Against the State Act at 80: Virtual Book Launch’

The launch of The Offences Against the State Act at 80, edited by Dr Mark Coen and published by Hart, was held as a webinar on Tuesday 29 July. Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of the Sutherland School of Law, welcomed attendees and introduced Ms Justice Úna Ní Raifeartaigh of the Court of Appeal, who chaired the event. The judge recalled appearing as a barrister before the Special Criminal Court in its previous Green Street location. Likening the book to a treasure chest, she praised the contributors for the variety of approaches they had taken to the legislation, including the use of historical, international and empirical methodologies. 

Professor Liora Lazarus of the University of British Columbia and Professor Colm O'Cinneide of University College London participated in the launch as discussants. Professor Larazus reviewed the book in the context of international scholarship on security and justice while Professor O'Cinneide located it within debates about the domestic legal order. Dr Mark Coen referred to the ongoing work of the independent review group established by the Government to examine the Offences Against the State Acts and expressed the hope that all submissions submitted to the group will be published in full on its website. Ms Justice Ní Raifeartaigh brought proceedings to a close by encouraging all present to purchase the book (Note: it can be ordered from the UCD Campus Book Shop: Tel 01 2691384).

A recording of the virtual Book Launch is available on the UCD Sutherland School of Law YouTube Channel at this link.

‘Critical Exploration of Human Rights’ Conference – IELF Forum

Some of the contributors at this recent online international conference

On 7 and 8 May 2021, the UCD Centre for Human Rights held a very successful international online conference on Critical Exploration of Human Rights: When Human Rights Become Part of the Problem. Adopting a critical perspective, speakers and attendees discussed a broad range of topics on human rights including the issue of humanisation of war, the issue of uses and abuses of human rights, the issue of inequalities and economic rights, the issue of human right advocacy and activism, but also human rights and violence, and human rights and crises.

Professor Samuel Moyn (Yale) delivered a fascinating keynote lecture on the Humanisation of the War based on his new book Human: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War about the origins and significance of humane war. Distinguished guest speakers, Professor Neve Gordon (Queen Mary University, London), Dr. Daniela Lai (Royal Holloway, University of London), Professor Jacques Leider (French Institute of Asian Studies), Dr. Joel Pruce (University of Dayton), and Dr. Sharon Weill (Sciences Po, Paris), delivered thought-provoking presentations which were followed by lively discussions. A suite of 22 papers were also delivered in the different panels over the two days.

The event was introduced by Professor Orla Feely, UCD Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact. She emphasised the importance of such contribution to the debate on human rights at a time when Ireland sits, as an elected member, at the United Nations Security Council for the 2021-22 term. Ireland is more than ever involved in complex issues involving human rights in different parts of the world and human rights are very much a key aspect of Irish foreign policy centred on the maintenance of international peace and security. Professor Colin Scott, Principal of the College of Social Sciences and Law and University Vice-President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, said that the Conference exemplified the interdisciplinarity and the international dimension of the research undertaken in the University and in the College of Social Sciences and Law in particular. Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of UCD Sutherland School of Law, acknowledged the importance of the Centre’s contribution for the School of Law. The Conference was the occasion to showcase the expertise of lawyers in human rights and cognate issues with the presentation in particular of the School’s newest ERC project PROPERTY[IN]JUSTICE by Professor Amy Strecker, lead investigator, Sonya Cotton and Raphael Ng’etich.

The event was co-organised by Dr. Marie-Luce Paris (Law, Director of the UCD Centre for Human Rights) and Dr. Lea David (Sociology), and co-funded by the UCD Sutherland School of Law as its 23^rd Irish European Law Forum, and the UCD School of Sociology.

The recordings of the presentations will shortly be available to view on UCD School of Law YouTube Channel.

Dr Mark Coen secures Visiting Fellowship at St Catherine's College, Oxford

Congratulations to our colleague Dr Mark Coen who has secured a Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University. Mark will be a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College in Hilary Term 2022 (January to March) where he will work on a number of projects relating to the history of trial by jury. One project will examine how the first women jurors were depicted in popular culture one hundred years ago while the second will explore the drafting and operation of the Juries (Protection) Acts in the Irish Free State.

Dr Coen's research on jury trials has been published in prestigious journals including the Law and History Review, the American Journal of Legal History, the Criminal Law Review, the Human Rights Law Review, the International Journal of Evidence and Proof and Legal Studies. The virtual launch of his edited collection The Offences Against the State Act 1939 at 80: A Model Counter-Terrorism Act? (Hart, 2021) will take place on Tuesday 29 June at 5pm. All are welcome to register for the launch here.

Register for Book Launch: 'The Offences Against the State Act at 80': 29 June at 5pm

UCD School of Law & Nasc Host Seminar Series on Direct Provision

 Pictured above is one of the seminar contributors, activist Owodunni Ola Mustapha

UCD Sutherland School of Law and Nasc, the Migrant and Refugee Rights Centre co-hosted a series of online webinars from November 2020 to March 2021 analysing the potential of proposals to end the system of direct provision. Direct provision is the name given to the state supports provided to persons seeking protection in Ireland. The system of direct provision has been subject to sustained criticism from persons seeking protection, civil society and academic research for almost twenty years.  

From Dr Catherine Day’s groundbreaking October 2020 report on dismantling the system of direct provision, to the Government’s White Paper on Ending Direct Provision in February 2021- this seminar series heard from persons who live or have lived in direct provision, documenting their experiences of the system and their analysis, and at times critique of the Day Report. Panelists also included civil society organisations who had campaigned against the system of direct provision since its inception in April 2000, government and opposition politicians, as well as academics from UCD. 

The key conclusions from this seminar series, was that the Irish Government needed to fulfil its Programme for Government commitment to dismantle direct provision, replacing this system with that centres dignity and respect for the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of persons seeking protection in Ireland.

Dr Joe McGrath secures Fulbright Scholarship at UC Berkeley

Congratulations to our colleague, Dr Joe McGrath who has secured a prestigious Fulbright award for the academic year, 2021-2022. Joe takes up a coveted research role as a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley. He will research a project entitled “Punishing Privilege” in which he investigates the extent to which federal responses to white-collar crime are formally punitive but practically lenient. In particular, the award supports his research with Dr. Deirdre Healy into how legal responses to wrongdoing vary by reference to gender, race and elite status.

Dr McGrath has published extensively in the field of white-collar crime and organisational culture. His first monograph, Corporate and White Collar Crime in Ireland: A New Architecture of Regulatory Enforcement, was published by Manchester University Press. His second book, White Collar Crime in Ireland: Law and Policy, which he edited and co-authored, was published by Clarus Press. He has also published in the leading international peer-reviewed journals in his fields, including the European Journal of Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Punishment and Society.

PROPERTY [IN]JUSTICE website launched

The ERC project PROPERTY [IN]JUSTICE at the UCD Sutherland School of Law have now launched a dedicated website and Twitter account for interested parties to keep up to date with this fascinating area of research.

PROPERTY [IN]JUSTICE investigates how international law facilitates spatial justice and injustice through its conceptualisation of property rights in land. Reflecting the international nature of the project, you can read the project's overview in English, Spanish, Swahili, Xhosa and Irish.

Associate Professor at the Sutherland School of Law, Dr. Amy Strecker (Principal Investigator), is joined on the project by Dr. Amanda Byer (Postdoctoral Researcher), Raphael Ng’etich and Sonya Cotton (PhD Candidates), Deirdre Norris (Project Manager) and Sinéad Mercier (Research Assistant).

The website will have a new blogpost from the team each month. Amy Strecker, PI of the project has uploaded her first blogpost on the origins of the project here: 'Landscape, Property and Spatial [In]Justice'.

The project can also be followed on Twitter at @LandLawJustice.

Professor Oonagh Breen leading NI Review of Charities Regulation

Professor Oonagh Breen of UCD Sutherland School of Law was appointed chair of the Independent Review of Charity Regulation in Northern Ireland earlier this year. She is joined on the panel by Rev Dr Lesley Carroll, Prisoner Ombudsman NI and Noel Lavery, former Permanent Secretary in the NICS.

The review was set up to consider the Charities Act (NI) 2008 (the Act) and the roles of the Charity Commission and the Department thereunder. In particular, it will examine whether the Commission’s performance within the existing legal framework strikes the right balance, in light of best practice, between supporting charities to do the right thing and deterring, or dealing with, misconduct. Ultimately it will make recommendations on changes that can be made to improve the delivery of services and the operation of the regulatory framework going forward.

The website for the independent review is as follows:

https://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/articles/independent-review-charity-regulation

Individuals working with charities that are active in Northern Ireland are invited to register for the webinar series or complete the online questionnaire.

Professor Breen is a graduate of UCD and Yale Law School, her research focuses on comparative charity law regulation and governance. She has worked with the non-profit sector, charity regulators and policymakers in a number of jurisdictions (including Ireland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada). Oonagh is President of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) and a member of the international advisory council to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL).  She is the author of the Enlarging the Space for European Philanthropy Report (DAFNE & EFC, 2018) and co-author of Breen and Smith, Law of Charities in Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2019).

UCD Law student’s webinar on inclusivity in digital learning

Congratulations to Aoibhínn Gilmartin, final year Law with Social Justice who recently organised a webinar entitled: ‘Inclusivity in Digital Learning: Student Perspectives’ (view here).

Aoibhinn is a student intern on the Irish Universities Association’s project, ‘Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning Project. As part of this project, she organised the webinar where students from different universities share their perspectives on having a disability and what it means in terms of accessing learning materials.

Aoibhinn has also written the blog post below about her experience on the project.

Aoibhínn Gilmartin’s Blog:

‘I am currently the UCD student intern on the Irish Universities Association’s project, ‘Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning Project. This project  is aimed at enhancing the digital attributes and educational experiences of Irish university students through enabling the mainstreamed and integrated use of digital technologies across the teaching and learning process.  Due to the switch to online learning the project temporarily re-focused to support a move to a more blended approach to teaching and learning in the academic year 2020/21.

My role has involved both projects within UCD and national initiatives with the IUA. I have worked on reviewing the new UCD Virtual Orientation module and I have been responsible for curating digital resources for students to help facilitate the switch to online learning.

Most recently I was involved in co-hosting a webinar ran by the IUA, ‘Inclusivity in Digital Learning: Student Perspectives’. This webinar focused on both the challenges and possibilities that online learning has posed to students with disabilities. Our speakers illustrated ways in which online learning can enhance inclusivity and can help students to overcome various barriers to higher education in the future if these inclusive practices are maintained. This webinar was widely attended and received very positive feedback and hopefully it will have an impact on inclusivity in higher education in a post-Covid learning environment.’

Dr Andrew Bremner Lyall RIP

The Dean of Law and the staff from Sutherland School of Law were greatly saddened by the death of our former colleague Andrew and wish to offer our condolences to his family, friends and former colleagues.

An obituary of his remarkable career, and the contribution that he made both personally and academically to the School of Law, follows below.

 Andrew Bremner Lyall PhD LLM LLD FLS FRHS

(6 October 1942 – 11 February 2021)

Andrew Bremner Lyall was appointed a College Lecturer in UCD Faculty of Law in 1980 having been awarded his PhD at the London School of Economics, his thesis dealing with “The social origins of property and contract: a study of East Africa before 1918”.  He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1997 and retired in 2007, though he remained a very active and productive independent scholar for the rest of his life.

Dr Lyall’s research interests originally focused on applying a Marxist analysis to the class relations underlying the law of property in East Africa and property law more generally, including in Ireland and the UK. His research also established him as a highly-regarded expert on African law and legal anthropology more generally. In later years, his interest in land law naturally led him to produce a significant body of work in the field of legal history (particularly of Ireland in the eighteenth century and of the law relating to slavery in that period.)

Dr Lyall’s published works reflected his meticulous attention to detail, his conceptual rigour and the clarity of his writing. Land Law in Ireland was first published in 1994 and is now in its fourth edition (edited by Dr Niamh Howlin and Dr Noel McGrath, faculty at the Sutherland School); it has established itself as the leading student textbook on the topic. The book, particularly as it was first conceived, demonstrated Dr Lyall’s socio-legal perspective on the law relating to the control and use of land, including chapters on planning and development and housing law. His later works reflected the turn in his interests towards legal history, notably Irish Exchequer Reports 1716—1734 (2009) which showed his command of the archival material and his understanding of historical context and was selected by the Selden Society as Volume 125 in their series. He was also the author of Granville Sharp’s Cases on Slavery (2017) and (with John Bergin) of The Acts of James II’s Irish Parliament (2016).

Dr Lyall was an awarded an LLD by the University of London in 1996, in recognition of his work on the law of East Africa and on Irish land law. The wide esteem for his scholarship was reflected in his election as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2018). He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (2001) and took pride in being related to the nineteenth century botanist and explorer David Lyall. He moved to London some years after his retirement, to be near his elder brothers David and Tom, both of whom survive him.

Dr Lyall’s students were fortunate that he brought to bear on preparing and delivering his courses all the attention to detail and conceptual richness that is evident in his publications. As well as learning about debates about the applicability of Althusser’s reworking of Marxist analysis of modes of production to pre-colonial Africa or contrasts between the forms of ownership found among the Nuer and the Kikuyu, students of land law also received an excellent grounding in estates, tenure, future interests and all the other traditional elements of the subject. It was natural that he should develop a course in African Law (later Legal Anthropology) so that students could delve more deeply into some of the topics he had broached in land law. It was long his ambition also to offer a course on the legal protection of cultural property and, while this never came to pass during his time in UCD, he would certainly be pleased to see that this is now a major focus within UCD Sutherland School of Law’s research. 

As well as teaching and researching, Dr Lyall fully embraced the administrative side of a university academic’s role and he brought the same qualities that marked the rest of his work to many reviews and proposals in relation to issues of teaching, learning and assessment. He was very much an early adopter of new technologies such as e-mail and the World Wide Web, when these first became available, and he was a dedicated user of LaTeX, the software system for document preparation.

Andrew was a student of Pate’s Grammar School, Cheltenham from 1954 to 1961 and went on to become a trainee manager at a local manufacturer of industrial machinery, Spirax-Sarco Ltd. After two years of this training, he became a student of University College London, graduating with an LLB degree in 1966. After graduation he went to East Africa, under the auspices of the charity Voluntary Service Overseas, and was a tutorial assistant for two years, teaching land law to students in Tanzania at the University of East Africa, Dar es Salaam. This led to a post as an Assistant Lecturer (1968-71) at the University of East Africa in 1968 (the University of Dar es Salaam after 1970) and as a Lecturer (1971-74) and a Senior Lecturer (1974-76) there. He obtained an LLM from the University of Dar es Salaam in 1973, for a thesis on “Land law and policy in Tanganyika 1919 – 1932”. While in Tanzania he became an Advocate of the High Court (in 1971) and he was called to the Bar of England and Wales at Gray’s Inn (Trinity, 1979). As a young man in Tanzania, Andrew was deeply impressed by the optimism and collective ambition he encountered in that recently independent nation and this was reflected in his lifelong commitment to equality, the right of all to dignity and respect, human rights and social justice. He was thus a leading member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement during the struggle against the former South African regime.

Andrew was a valued and much-loved colleague, who will be particularly missed by his friends from the old UCD Common Room, where he felt very much at his ease and put many others at theirs. They and his many other friends throughout University College Dublin and across the world will remember him fondly.

Dr. Bernd Justin Jütte wins RIA Charlemont Grant

Dr. Bernd Justin Jütte has been awarded a prestigious Charlemont Grant from the Royal Irish Academy to launch a cooperation with researchers from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) to investigate the use of copyrighted material in online teaching.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the restrictive effects of copyright law on online teaching. In general, uses of protected works, including excerpts from textbooks and journal articles, require authorization from authors or publishers. Copyright law foresees several mechanisms to enable the use of such material without authorization, amongst the so-called copyright exceptions.

The project “Overcoming Copyright Barriers to Online Teaching and Learning post-COVID“ CoDE will examine and map existing copyright exceptions relevant to online teaching and establish an observatory on the implementation of Article 5 of the recently adopted EU Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market.

The project builds on collaborative research (see here, here and here) between Dr. Jütte and several other researches on the legal implications of copyright and data protection law in online teaching.

Scholarships offered to Graduate Taught and Doctoral Students for Autumn 2021

UCD Sutherland School of Law welcomes applications for a range of scholarships from students planning to undertake graduate studies in Autumn 2021.  These include bursaries funded by the School and a series of scholarships supported by donors to the School of Law. 

The deadline to apply for Graduate Taught (Masters) scholarships is 31 May 2021.  All students who apply by that date will be considered for the applicable scholarships.

Full details for all scholarships including closing dates will be published shortly on this website here. 

Professor Oonagh Breen joins new Housing Regulatory Board

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Professor Oonagh Breen on her appointment to the board of the newly established Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority.  The board has been set up by Minister for Housing, Local Government & Heritage, Darragh O’Brien TD. Professor Breen joins the following distinguished individuals in a five year term on the board:

• Edward Lewis (Chair)
• Seamus Neely
• Eileen Gleeson
• Geraldine Hynes
• Jillian Mahon
• John McCarthy
• Michael Cameron
• Orla Coyne

The Regulator will have responsibility for establishing and maintaining a register of Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs), preparing standards by which AHBs will be monitored and assessed, and encouraging and facilitating the better governance, administration and management, including corporate governance and financial management of AHBs. The Regulator will also have powers to carry out investigations and cancel the registration of AHBs. Minister O’Brien commented on the new board as follows:

“I am delighted to establish the Regulator and appoint its first members. This is a significant development for the Approved Housing Body sector...Approved Housing Bodies play a crucial role across the housing spectrum; delivering much needed social homes, helping families and individuals to exit homelessness and supporting people to live independently in their own homes.”

The Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority can be contacted at info@ahbregulator.ie

CALESA (Capacity Building for Legal and Social Advancement in the Philippines) 

UCD Sutherland School of Law New Major Collaborative Project with Spain and The Philippines

UCD Sutherland School of Law is proud to be part of a new international project with partners in Spain and the Philippines. CALESA (Capacity Building for Legal and Social Advancement in the Philippines) is an EU-funded Erasmus + Capacity Building project in the field of Higher Education. The key CALESA objective is that the Philippines’ leading law schools adopt curricular innovations that are focused on research, multilingualism, human rights and the rule of law, regional integration and comparative law in a manner that is consistent with the Bologna process in order to facilitate portability with EU universities. UCD Sutherland School of Law is one of four European partners that will collaborate with institutions in the Philippines, including the Philippine Judicial Academy. The project is led by Professor José Torres, University of Malaga, Spain.

Associate Professor Richard Collins and Associate Professor Marie-Luce Paris will be contributing to training in the areas of public international law, the law of the sea and regional human rights. The overall funding available for the project is €999,665. Richard and Marie-Luce have been awarded €83,354 by the Education Audio-visual & Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the EU as co-PIs of the project in UCD.

Welcoming this new collaboration, the Dean of Law said that: ‘The Sutherland School, as a common law School of Law in the EU is committed to the transformative potential of law for society and welcomes this new initiative.’

The CALESA website can be accessed here.

European Traineeships in Intellectual Property

UCD Sutherland School of Law students are encouraged to apply now for the Pan-European Seal Professional Traineeship Programme at the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office). The deadline for applications is 15 March 2022.

This Traineeship Programme is a vehicle for early talent detection among Europe’s brightest and highest-achieving graduates. It targets young, aspiring graduates from several academic backgrounds (IP and non-IP) who will be sponsored by the EUIPO and the EPO for one year-long, paid traineeships.

Each member of the Pan-European Seal is entitled to submit yearly two shortlists, one for the EUIPO and one for the EPO.  An average of 100 trainees are selected from shortlists supplied from all members throughout Europe. Traineeships take place either at the EUIPO or the EPO with a monthly training allowance, as well as other benefits.

Trainees have the opportunity to benefit from on-the-job coaching by staff, as well as online training, e-courses in their field of expertise and language courses in one of the official languages of each office.

Interested UCD students should email Associate Dean, Dr Cliona Kelly at: cliona.kelly@ucd.ie for further information.

More Information on the Pan-European Seal Traineeship:

Website: For more information go to epo.org/pan-european-seal 

Video: For an insight into the Traineeship Programme and the first-hand experiences of former Trainees at the European Patent Office see https://bit.ly/PanEuropeanSealV

#PANEUROPEANSEAL 

Chief Justice addresses Class of 2020 Conferring

We were honoured that the Chief Justice, the Hon. Mr Justice Frank Clarke sent a message to our graduating class for their virtual conferring in 2020. In what was a very difficult year for all, it was wonderful for law students to hear his words of encouragement at their special event.

The Chief Justice's message can be viewed here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aonkyed66sQ

We were also pleased that two of the graduating class delivered inspiring speeches for their fellow students as part of the Virtual Conferring Ceremony. They were Niall O’Shaughnessy, BCL (Law with Social Justice) and Andrea Whelton, BBL (Bachelor of Business and Law).  Their speeches can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfwrGEiynk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f27dStnZC1k

The staff at the Sutherland School of Law look forward to welcoming back the Graduating Class of 2020 in person in the future and would like to extend our warmest wishes to each of them in their future careers.

War Journalist Sally Hayden receives 2020 Law Alumni Award

UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to honour War Journalist, Sally Hayden with the 2020 Law Alumni Award. Sally graduated with a BCL in 2012 and is is an award-winning journalist and photographer focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises.  

In the relatively short time since she left college, Sally’s work has taken her across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for outlets including the BBC, TIME, the Guardian, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, CNN International, NBC News, Channel 4 News, the New York Times, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Magnum Photos, the Irish Times, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, RTÉ and many more. Between 2014 and 2016 she was staff with VICE News, based out of the UK. Since 2017, Sally has been reporting on allegations of the exploitation of refugees and corruption by staff within the United Nations Refugee Agency. Her reporting has launched internal investigations in several countries, and resulted in a UNHCR staff member being found guilty of abuse of power in Sudan this year. Her latest series, ‘Asylum For Sale’, was funded by Journalists for Transparency, with editorial support from 100Reporters, and focused on Kenya and Uganda. In 2018,

Sally won first prize in the European Migration Media Awards, best ‘foreign coverage’ at the Newsbrands Irish Journalism Awards, and was a finalist for the Amnesty International Gaby Rado Award for Best New Journalist, the Kurt Schork Awards for International Journalism, the Frontline Club Awards, the One World Media Awards, and named a ‘Rising Star’ by the US News Media Alliance. She was also a member of Transparency International’s 2018 Anti-Corruption Award Committee, a Logan nonfiction fellow, and listed in the 2019 Forbes ’30 Under 30′ for Media in Europe.

We are delighted to be able to share some thoughts from Sally where she remembers her time in UCD while offering some very inspiring advice to our current students. 

What are your fondest memories of UCD? “Being a student ambassador, giving tours and encouraging secondary students to come to UCD – especially rewarding when they were set to be the first in their family to attend.”

What key life skill did you pick up at UCD? “I loved meeting a wide range of people, in class, when playing with the orchestra and travelling for debating. I wrote for the University Observer. In my third year, I went on exchange to UNSW in Sydney. That taught me a lot about arriving in a place where you know no one and building something of a life.”

What career achievements are you most proud of? “It’s hard to say I’m proud of anything – I always think of the people in desperate situations who I’ve interviewed – it’s rare anything changes for them even after a report comes out. However, I still believe in the value of journalism and my reporting has been used in legal challenges against governments and referenced by the US State Department and at the European Parliament.”

Would you change any aspect of your career? “Journalism is in crisis – pay is low and it’s difficult to fund reporting. If journalism isn’t funded, wrongdoing goes unexposed.

Advice for today’s graduates? “Work hard. Be humble. Keep learning. Don’t be too proud to start from the bottom. Follow your passions instead of money. Give back. Amplify the voices of those who are overlooked.”

Emeritus Professor Nial Osborough MRIA RIP

The Dean of Law and the staff from Sutherland School of Law were greatly saddened by the death of our colleague, Emeritus Professor Nial Osborough MRIA, and wish to offer our condolences to his daughters, Sarah and Rachel, and son Conor.

Nial was an intellectual powerhouse who nurtured many scholars of Irish legal history, several of whom we now have as colleagues within Sutherland School of Law.  He was the leading Irish legal historian, a founding member and former President of the Irish Legal History Society which has honoured him through its annual W.N. Osborough Composition Prize in Legal History.  A former editor of the Irish Jurist, his career spanned Queens University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and, of course, here in UCD.   We were  honoured to have him write a history of the Law School (The Law School of University College Dublin: A History (2014).  He also wrote The Irish Stage: A Legal History (2015); Literature, Judges and the Law (2008); Studies in Irish Legal History (1999); Law and the Emergence of Modern Dublin: A Litigation Topography for a Capital City (1996); and Borstal in Ireland: Custodial Provision for the Young Adult Offender, 1906-1974 (1975). He edited several essay collections, and published numerous articles and essays dealing with vastly diverse areas of Irish legal history. 

Nial is fondly remembered by many staff with the Sutherland School of Law.  Speaking about his passing, Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law commented: ‘I feel privileged to have the chance to get to know him, to listen to his fascinating and illuminating discussions on a myriad of historical topics (often at the bicycle racks). He is a huge loss to the scholarly law community on the island of Ireland and especially to us here in UCD.’

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.

School of Law Christmas Fundraiser for SVP

The Sutherland School of Law is delighted to support the SVP Christmas Appeal 2020.  Please just take a second and donate what you can afford here.

Normally we ask staff and students to buy a gift for a child and leave it under the School ‘Generositree’ Christmas Tree.

This year, with so few on campus, we’re asking you to donate whatever you would have spent on your ‘Generositree’ gift to ensure that all children get a chance to enjoy this Christmas.

Just click on this link to donate.

Thank you for your generosity.

Professional Diploma in Arbitration: Government Funded places for January 2021

UCD Sutherland School of Law is currently offering a number of Government funded places on the Professional Diploma in Arbitration commencing in January 2021.  This initiative, arising from the call for stimulus initiatives is also contributing to the School’s aim of empowering humanity.

This initiative will enable candidates to upskill and undertake a unique and internationally recognized Professional Diploma and to make a real difference in dispute resolution, in conducting and participating in Irish arbitrations.  

The closing date to apply for Government funded places on the Diploma in Arbitration is Friday, 11 December 2020.  

Applications for the Diploma will be accepted up until 11 January 2021.  For more information on the Diploma please click on this link.  

Who should Apply?

Alumni from the Diploma include a range of professionals and executives engaged in personnel management, public administration, or planning, architects, consulting engineers, chartered surveyors, property professionals and accountants.  Applications are welcome from those with approved university degrees, academic and/or professional qualifications and/or career experience that would satisfy the School that candidates are well placed to successfully engage with and contribute to what is a leading Professional Diploma.

The aim of the Government in providing Stimulus Funding to the UCD Sutherland School of Law is to enable skills development or reskilling for those who may be returning to the labour market in areas of growing and needed skills, such as:

• Returners to the work environment such as homemakers and carers
• the Unemployed.
• Former Self Employed and Employed looking to reskill in areas of growing need.

Eligibility and the criteria for awarding the Government funded places that are available will align with the Government’s aim and with Springboard+ eligibility criteria which are detailed here https://springboardcourses.ie/eligibility  and the entry requirements for the Diploma.  Eligible applicants must be ordinarily resident in Ireland and must meet the nationality and EU residency rules as aligned to Springboard as detailed here https://springboardcourses.ie/faq. This funding has been approved under the Higher Education Authority and Government of Ireland - July Stimulus Package - Modular Skills Provision. For full details on this Government Funded initiative see the July Stimulus - Higher Education Initiatives.

Please direct enquiries to lawdiplomas@ucd.ie.

Please Note that personal data may be shared with the Higher Education Authority, for example, to determine eligibility for funding or for statistical purposes. This will at all times be done in compliance with GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Further information can be found here

MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice: Government Funded places for January 2021

As part of a national initiative to address the skills need of the economy, UCD Sutherland School of Law is pleased to confirm that a limited number of Government Funded places are being offered on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice.  This government funding will allow for full fee remission for new applicants* for the programme commencing in January 2021 and concluding in December 2021.  Please note that the closing date to apply for these places is 4 December 2020.

This MSc is a unique programme, based in Ireland’s only Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, it is suitable for non-lawyers who wish to work in the field of criminology and criminal justice.

For more details and how to apply please click on this link.

Financial support is designed to increase access to postgraduate courses and priority will be given to:

• Returners and Homemakers who have been out of the work environment for a number of years due to childcare or other caring duties.
• Those currently in employment who want to re-skill.
• Those who were formerly self-employed and who wish to re-skill.
• Recent graduates with at least a Level 8 qualification.

For full details of these priorities, see the July Stimulus - Higher Education Initiatives.

*Fee remission not available for students who do not qualify for EU fee status.

Please direct informal enquiries to lawdiplomas@ucd.ie

Please Note that personal data may be shared with the Higher Education Authority, for example, to determine eligibility for funding or for statistical purposes. This will at all times be done in compliance with GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Further information can be found here

UCD to Host one of the World’s Leading International Legal Conferences in 2022

The UCD Centre for Constitutional Studies will host one of the world’s leading international legal conferences in 2022, it was announced.

The conference will be the latest in the biennial Public Law series, the most prestigious forum for the discussion of public law matters in the common law world.

The three day event is expected to attract hundreds of prominent public law figures to Dublin.

The announcement was made by Professor Jason Varuhas of the University of Melbourne at an event in Australia. The conference will take place in July 2022.

The decision to award the event to Dublin has particular significance given that 2022 will mark the centenary of the first Irish Constitution.

Welcoming the announcement, Director of the Centre Professor Eoin Carolan said “We’re delighted that UCD will host the Public Law Conference in 2022. Having such a major event in Ireland is a real privilege, especially given the year that is in it. It will be a great opportunity for Irish scholars to showcase their work to an international audience”.

“UCD Sutherland School of Law has a long tradition of public law scholarship reflected in the UCD Centre for Constitutional Studies and in this prestigious conference.  We look forward to welcoming leading public law scholars from across the world” Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law commented.

UCD follows in the footsteps of the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne as the host of the event. The School of Law in University College Dublin was recently ranked No. 1 in Ireland in the Times Higher World University Rankings 2021 by subject.

THE Rankings position UCD Sutherland School of Law as Ireland’s leading University Law School

UCD Sutherland School of Law is delighted to announce that the Times Higher Education World Rankings 2021 has ranked us 84th in the World for Law. The achievement is particularly notable as it acknowledges the Law School as the leading university Law School in Ireland.

The Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher commented on the announcement: 

“ The School is delighted to see its work recognised in this way across teaching and research and acknowledging our strong international outlook.” 

Full details of the Times Higher Education Rankings can be accessed here.

UCD Sutherland School of Law is also consistently positioned in the Top 100 University Law Schools in the QS World University Rankings by Subject which are based upon academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact.

Professional Diplomas Enrolling for January 2021

UCD Sutherland School of Law is pleased to confirm that the following Level 9 Professional Diplomas are currently enrolling for a January 2021 start:  

• Professional Diploma in Data Protection and Governance
• Professional Diploma in Arbitration

Further information is available at by emailing lawdiplomas@ucd.ie.

Professional Diploma in Data Protection and Governance

The Diploma is a 24-week part-time programme, delivered over two semesters.  It is designed to supply training for Data Protection Officers and others involved in the compliance role in organisations.  It will also be of relevance to any legal practitioners involved in this area. 

The programme is co-ordinated by Dr TJ McIntyre of Sutherland School of Law who is well known for his expertise is the area. Diploma has been designed to meet the training needs that have developed in Ireland since the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2018.  GDPR has meant that significant new data protection obligations have been imposed on Irish organisations. 

Professional Diploma in Arbitration

This one-year part-time Diploma is the only one of its kind in Ireland and will equip participants with the competence required to conduct or participate in arbitrations. The programme co-ordinator is Brian Hutchinson, Associate Professor at UCD Sutherland School of Law, who is both a Chartered Arbitrator and Accredited Mediator and is a renowned expert in the area of arbitration.

The Arbitration Act was introduced in 2010 to make Ireland a world leader in the field of arbitration and the focus of the Diploma is on domestic arbitration. It is designed to equip students with the level of competence in Irish law and procedure required to conduct or participate in arbitrations between Irish parties. 

If you would like any more information on these diplomas please email lawdiplomas@ucd.ie.

Seminar Series on the Day Report & Direct Provision

Nasc, the Migrant and Refugee Rights Centre and UCD Sutherland School of Law are co-hosting a seminar series Exploring the Day Report.

In October 2020, a group chaired by Dr Catherine Day made the most significant recommendations that impact on rights of persons seeking international protection in Ireland, and for people subject to Ireland’s system of direct provision. 

Exploring the Day Report seminar series, via Zoom, discusses the recommendations of the Day Advisory Group, through reflections from those who issued the report, academic analysis of particular issues, thoughts from activists and civil society on implementing the Day Report recommendations, along with political perspectives on advancing the implementation of the Day Report. Details on the seminar programme, including registration requirements for all seminars is available here.

HEA Supports Additional Places on Law Graduate Programmes

MSc in Criminology & Criminal Justice and Professional Diploma in Arbitration

UCD Sutherland School of Law is pleased to announce that the Higher Education Authority (HEA) has agreed to fund seven additional places on the MSc in Criminology & Criminal Justice and ten places on the Professional Diploma in Arbitration, both of which commence in January 2021.

This follows a Government announcement by Minister Harrris launching over 14,000 free Higher Education places to help people get back to work and upskill workers. College places have been made available on these graduate programmes in support of this national objective to address the skills needs of the economy. This funding has been approved under the Higher Education Authority and Government of Ireland - July Stimulus Package - Postgraduate Skills Provision. 

Full details of the MSc in Criminology & Criminal Justice are available here. Click here for MSc Criminology & Criminal Justice Flyer

Details of the eligibility requirements for the Professional Diploma in Arbitration are available here. 

Applications for both will open in early November but please email law.diplomas@ucd.ie to register your interest in the meantime.

Personal data may be shared with the Higher Education Authority, for example to determine eligibility for funding or for statistical purposes. This will at all times be done in compliance with GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Further information can be found here- https://hea.ie/about-us/data_protection/ 

Dr Nina Lueck and Prof. Oonagh Breen present at this years Marie Curie conference hosted by UCD

During the summer trimester, Professor Oonagh Breen (PI) and Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow Dr Nina Lueck participated in the European Research Executive Agency’s (REA) two days Monitoring Mission for MSCA Individual Fellows.

This year’s monitoring meeting was jointly hosted by UCD Research and REA’s project officers from Brussels. 

Seven of UCD’s MSCA Fellows from a range of disciplines (such as medicine, history, agriculture, law) presented and discussed their work. 

Nina Lueck presented preliminary findings of problem-centred and narrative interviews she has conducted with 52 refugees and asylum seekers about their experience in accessing third level education in Ireland.

The preliminary findings illustrated financial and non-financial barriers to enter universities, such as non-eligibility for scholarships, the cost of transport to and from colleges, the distance between accommodation centres and universities, the inability to change hostels for educational reasons, denial of work permits, insecurity and long waiting times concerning their legal status, the ineptitude of direct provision for students, language barriers and dealing with health issues such as combatting trauma.

Her presentation also highlighted positive aspects such as the tailored support by university staff (both academic and administrative) and members of voluntary organisations.

Dignity and Respect in the Sutherland School of Law

Everyone in the Law School should be able to engage in learning and research in an inclusive environment based on mutual respect. Each member of the School, staff and student alike, is expected to behave with respect towards, and to honour the dignity and diversity of, everyone in the School.   The School takes breaches of dignity and respect through bullying, harassment, including sexual harassment very seriously.  Should you experience or witness any behaviour that falls below these essential and strongly held values then rest assured that any approach you make will be treated confidentially, seriously and sensitively. For options, formal and informal, internal and external please go to https://reportandsupport.ucd.ie/  which sets out comprehensively what supports are available.   These range from anonymous reporting to a formal complaint within UCD to approaching specialist supports outside UCD.  You may also approach the student adviser, nadia.clarkin@ucd.ie or, for PhD students, carita.bramhill@ucd.ie We hope that you never have to avail of these but if you do, that you know you will be supported.

For definitions of what constitutes bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, please see the policy here and its procedures.  Note, the UCD Dignity and Respect Policy is currently being reviewed.

Registration Enquiry Form Sutherland School of Law

Trimester 1, 2020, Law Programmes: Guidance for students

UCD Sutherland School of Law is finalising how teaching, learning and assessment will be conducted over T1/20, noting that this may need to adapt as public health guidance changes.  It is clear that students value the opportunity to learn in a campus setting, but we also recognise that some forms of teaching lend themselves to distance learning more than others.  Therefore, the School has decided to use a blend of face-to-face and online learning options to optimise the student experience whilst maintaining a safe learning environment.

For information on the School of Law Autumn Trimester programmes we have prepared the following documents for undergraduate and graduate students:

Undergraduate Students

Graduate Students

The principles that inform the approach of the Sutherland School are: safety, rigour, compassion and agility. First and foremost, we aim to protect student and staff health as much as we are able given the current situation. We will be guided by public health guidelines on this. Second, we aim to provide the best high-quality learning experience we can within the limitations of current covid restrictions. Third, we have designed our plan so that, if needs be, we can shift to being entirely online with minimal disruption. There are compromises required but we aim to provide a framework that facilitates learning through a blended approach that will enable you to undertake your studies in a way that balances different considerations in these extraordinary times.

The information in the documents above relates only to modules offered by the School of Law.  If you are taking any modules outside the Law School, please contact that School for information on their modules.

Finally, if you have any queries please contact uglaw@ucd.ie (BCL), bbl@ucd.ie (Business and Law) and graduate students can email lawdiplomas@ucd.ie.

UCD Law PhD student joins Anti-Racism Committee

Congratulations to our PhD student, Bashir Otukoya who has joined Ireland’s newly formed independent anti-racism committee. Bashir is also a member of the Irish Refugee Council and combines teaching in Athlone IT with his doctoral studies.  His doctoral supervisor in UCD Sutherland School of Law is Dr Marie-Luce Paris who is the Academic Director of the UCD Centre for Human Rights.  Bashir’s thesis, under the supervision of Dr Paris, is as follows:  

BHÉITH ÉIREANNACH (Becoming Irish):A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE IRISH NATURALISATION SYSTEM

The anti-racism committee is chaired by Caroline Fennell, Professor of Law at University College Cork, and Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and includes a diverse cohort from sport, journalism, travellers rights, migrant rights, the ICTU union and the employers’ organisation IBEC. 

The group will review the current evidence on racial discrimination in Ireland and look at best international practice on measures to combat racism with a view to reporting to government in three months.

UCD Law students awarded prestigious UK Scholarships

(L to R) Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair, Eoin MacLachlan, Mark O’Brien O’Reilly and Samantha O'Brien O'Reilly

For the second year in a row a UCD Sutherland School of Law graduate has been awarded a Lord Mansfield scholarship for the Bar Professional Training Course in London, the top scholarship of Lincoln’s Inn.   

Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair BCL (Law with Philosophy) 2016 was awarded this prestigious scholarship for 2019/2020.  During her time studying law in UCD, Clíodhna was not only an excellent student, debating coach and tutor she was also winner of the Irish Times Debating Competition. On graduation, she undertook an LLM in Harvard where she was a recipient of an Irving R Kaufman Fellowship award.

Eoin MacLachlan has recently been awarded the Lord Mansfield scholarship for 2020/2021.  Eoin studied the BCL (Law with Economics) and since graduating in 2017 has completed an LLM in Cambridge and worked at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in London for the past two years. At UCD Eoin was Auditor of the UCD Literary & Historical Society and was also a winner of the Irish Times Debating Competition.

We also wish to congratulate outstanding student Mark O'Brien O'Reilly BCL (Law with History) 2019 who was awarded the Baroness Hale of Richmond Scholarship at Gray’s Inn.  While at UCD, Mark was an accomplished debater and won the UCD Law Society Gold Medal for Mooting.  In the autumn of 2020 Mark will commence pupillage at Francis Taylor Building in October 2021, a specialist planning, environmental and public law set. He has also been awarded the Snowdon Cambridge Scholarship and will commence an LLM in the University of Cambridge later this year.

Mark's achievement is doubly impressive in that his sister, Samantha O'Brien O'Reilly,is a past recipient of a scholarship from Gray's Inn - the Shakespeare Memorial Award.  Samantha is also a graduate from UCD Sutherland School of Law having completed her BCL (Law with French Law) in 2016.  She is now a pupil of 4 Pump Court in London, a leading barristers' chambers with expertise in commercial, construction, energy, professional negligence, shipping and technology work. 

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates these outstanding students on their remarkable achievements.

Sutherland School of Law welcomes a third ERC Grant

L to R Dr Amy Strecker, Professor Eoin Carolan and Professor Suzanne Kingston

Dr Amy Strecker’s European Research Council (ERC) Starter award of €1.5 million is the third ERC grant awarded to Sutherland School of Law. This follows a €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant secured by Professor Eoin Carolan in 2018 and the School’s first ever ERC award of €1.5 million won by Professor Suzanne Kingston in 2015.

Dr Amy Strecker’s project, Land, Property and Spatial Justice in International Law (PROPERTY[IN]JUSTICE) investigates the ways in which international law facilitates spatial justice and injustice through its conceptualisation of property rights. The overall aim of the project is to advocate a more socially-just interpretation of property in relation to land. 

Professor Eoin Carolan, was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for a 5-year study, entitled The Foundations of Institutional Authority (FIAT). This project explores how separation of powers systems are being affected by current social and political trends. This is a problem for constitutional models, like the separation of powers, that divide power between traditional institutions. The questions that will be raised will include: How can a constitution work if voters distrust their government? How should separation of powers systems change to meet this challenge?  

The School’s first ERC grant, Legal Architectures: The Influence of New Environmental Governance Rules on Environmental Compliance asks the question, ‘how can we design our environmental governance laws to maximise environmental compliance?’ Professor Suzanne Kingston and her research team investigate the influence that environmental governance laws have on compliance decisions, and how we might best design our laws to maximise compliance. In 2017, Suzanne was further honoured by Enterprise Ireland as one of Ireland's ‘Champions of EU Research’, for achieving the highest-ranking Irish ERC grant across all disciplines in her category.

Dr. Marie-Luce Paris is awarded the prestigious IRC Ulysses Grant

Associate Professor Marie-Luce Paris has won the prestigious IRC Ulysses Travel Grant for 2020. The Travel Grant is aimed at fostering strong research connections between Ireland and France. Dr. Paris is one of the four recipients in UCD to have received the award this year. This is the first time that the IRC Ulysses Grant has been awarded for a Law related project.

Dr. Paris, as Principal Investigator, will team up with Professor David Farrell of the School of Politics and International Relations to work on a research project entitled DECIDE2 (Democracy in Crisis: Exploring the Citizen Challenge of DEliberative Democracy in light of the French and Irish Constitutional Experiments) in collaboration with Aix Marseille Université.

See IRC Twitter here and French Embassy in Ireland here.

BBL graduate undertakes PhD in Legal History at Yale University

Congratulations to Business and Law graduate Fisayo Akinlude who has been accepted to undertake a PhD at Yale University. 

Fisayo graduated with a BBL degree in 2017 and then pursued her interest in legal history by undertaking a Masters Degree in History in UCD.  In 2019 she was awarded an NUI Travelling Doctorate Scholarship.  With her doctorate studies in legal history she aims to analyse the legal frameworks that facilitated or hindered movement for Black travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British empire.  Her PhD proposal is provisionally entitled 'The post emancipation legal code'.  

The Sutherland School of Law congratulates Fisayo on her remarkable achievements to date and wishes her luck in the next stage of her academic career in the United States.

Celebrating Twenty Years of the Fordham Summer School

The Fordham Summer School group  (2017) with the Joint Secretary of the North South Ministerial Council

UCD Sutherland School of Law this year is celebrating twenty years partnering with Fordham Law School, New York for their Summer School programme. Over this time, a significant number of law students and professors from Fordham Law School have travelled to Ireland for a Summer programme designed to build relationships between Fordham, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland.  Students study international law and conflict resolution in both Belfast and Dublin and experience first-hand its impact on both cities. 

The programme offers 40 externships providing the opportunity to work with some of the best barristers, solicitors, and judges in Dublin and Belfast to allow students build an international network.  This year because of the travel restrictions imposed by the Covid 19 crisis, the Fordham Summer School took place online but plans are already underway for it to take place again in Ireland in 2021.

To celebrate the twenty year anniversary of the Fordham Summer School we asked one of our alumni, Aodhán Peelo, to write a piece about his experience of the programme in 2017.  At the time he was studying Law with Philosophy at UCD Sutherland School of Law, he is now a Strategy Consulting Analyst at Accenture, having graduated from UCD in 2018.

‘In summer 2017, I and three friends from UCD found ourselves on the Belfast train, traveling to join the first leg of the Fordham University Summer School. We were greeted by an uncharacteristically sunny day, and an entirely characteristically warm welcome from Professors Martin, Lazebnik and Feerick.

We spent one full week hosted by Queens University Belfast, studying 'Human Rights and Resolving Conflict in Northern Ireland', before returning to Dublin for the second leg of learning. The full course was a chance to experience the U.S. Socratic style of learning at its best. From the start, we dived into class discussions that were as fascinating as they were challenging. As well as lessons from Fordham’s professors, the course offered a unique chance to learn from leading academics and activists in both Belfast and Dublin. Each shared their experiences and expertise of putting human rights into practice.

The Fordham programme made a particular effort to bring academic discussions to pragmatic conclusions. After two weeks of readings, discussions and lectures, I was caught off guard by the exam question - ‘ Are human rights more a distraction than critical to the process...?’. But having had the course we did, it wasn’t difficult to decide which way to argue. The range of distinguished guests all spoke to one theme - What can be done to make rights frameworks a reality?.  I think it was this focussed pragmatism that made their enthusiasm so infectious. The warmth and insight from students and lecturers alike made a fantastic course, and fabulous memories.’

'UK in a Changing Europe': Blog by Prof Joseph McMahon

Professor Joseph McMahon, full professor of Commercial Law at the UCD Sutherland School of Law has recently published a blog on the prestigious website of ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’. Prof McMahon's piece is titled 'Negotiating the UK-EU trade agreement’  and describes in detail the complexity of these crucial negotiations against a backdrop of the end of the year deadline to get a comprehensive agreement in place.

'The UK in a Changing Europe' is an initiative intended to improve access to research on the relationship between the UK and the European Union. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), it is based at King's College London.

Professor McMahon’s blog is available to read here.

Professional Diplomas Commencing 21 September 2020 

UCD Sutherland School of Law is pleased to confirm that the following Level 9 Professional Diplomas are currently enrolling and will start in the week commencing 21 September:  

• Professional Diploma in Data Protection and Governance 
• Professional Diploma in Law

Further information is available by emailing lawdiplomas@ucd.ie or by phoning 01 716 4114.

Professional Diploma in Data Protection and Governance

The Diploma is a 24-week part-time programme, delivered over two trimesters (12 weeks in the Autumn, 12 in the Spring trimester).  It is designed to supply training for Data Protection Officers and others involved in compliance roles in organisations.  It will also be of relevance to any legal practitioners involved in this area. 

The programme is co-ordinated by Dr TJ McIntyre of the Sutherland School of Law who is well known for his expertise in the area. This Diploma has been specifically designed to meet the training needs that developed since the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force two years ago.  The GDPR has meant that significant new data protection obligations have been imposed on Irish organisations. 

Classes will take place at 6pm on Wednesdays in the Autumn term (first class on Wednesay 23 September) and 5pm on Thursdays in the Spring term. Teaching will be face to face in large theatres designed to allow for 2 metre social distancing (Note: should government guidelines in relation to face to face teaching alter, alternative teaching methods will be offered). 

Professional Diploma in Law (General)

This Diploma has been designed to allow students the opportunity to choose from a wide range of legal modules. You will study alongside Masters (LLM) Students and may consider continuing to study an LLM (subject to meeting entry requirements).

• Diploma students can tailor their programme to their own specific needs in terms of selecting the modules that interest them most and the class times that suit them best.
• The Professional Diploma in Law offers students a choice of modules from the Masters in Law (LLM) programmes, and lectures are shared with LLM students.  In essence, students ‘build’ their own unique Professional Diploma in Law, concentrating on the areas of law of most interest or relevance to them, i.e. Human Rights, IP & IT, Criminology & Criminal Justice, etc.

Applications are also being accepted for the following Professional Diplomas in the Spring term (commencing late January):

Professional Diploma in Professional Regulation 

Professional Diploma in Arbitration

There will also be a Professional Diploma in Employment Law commencing in late Spring. If you require any further information or wish to apply for any of these diplomas please email lawdiplomas@ucd.ie or phone 01 716 4114.

Student Reading List - Staff Recommendations

This reading list was selected by faculty in the School of Law for students who are considering coming to UCD to study Law.  See below the wide range of items they have suggested you might like to read or watch. This is not an essential reading list, it is extracurricular reading which also includes podcasts and movies which we think students will enjoy.  If you download it in Powerpoint you will also get links to certain items.

We hope you find it interesting and we look forward to welcoming you to UCD Sutherland School of Law in the future. To download the reading list click the link below:

UCD School of Law Student Reading List - Staff Recommendations

Covid 19: Message from Dean of Law to Students

On March 23^rd, Professor Imelda Maher contacted all law students returning from their two-week reading break.  Her email welcomed them back to the much-changed and challenging learning environment.  Her objective was to inform students of the supports on offer from UCD Sutherland School of Law, and above all, to reassure them in these unprecedented times.  Below are the key points for students in relation to the forthcoming weeks.  The university also has this useful FAQ webpage for students to consult for information (it is regularly updated).

E-learning

All module coordinators have been updating Brightspace and each of them will contact students about the changes ahead. There will be some variation as to how staff approach remote learning, just as there is variation when teaching is on campus, so it is very important that students check in with each module and make sure they know what is happening.  Students cannot assume that because one module coordinator does it one way, all the others will as well (different approaches to teaching are discussed regularly in the School and the view is that differences in approach deepen and enhance the student learning experience).

Tutorials

For undergraduates, tutorials are also going online or being replaced by written exercises. Students should consult each module on Brightspace.

Assessment

On assessment, the School is currently planning assessments and students can expect to get clear guidance over the coming weeks from their module coordinators about what is expected of them. They will need to plan their time and manage their deadlines - remembering that assessments can of course be submitted ahead of deadlines. The principle the School is applying is that no student is to be disadvantaged by the changes. In short, standards will be maintained but not raised and as with any assessment, they are still just being asked to show that they have met the module learning outcomes - nothing extra.

Skills

It is different working remotely so there will be a process of getting used to it. Students should be patient and be aware that it will broaden their skill-set further and require a different kind of focus, discipline and organisation.  These are skills that will be invaluable in the workplace so this is an opportunity to learn in new ways, to address what even just in educational (as opposed to social, economic or medical) terms is a considerable challenge, and to win through.

Exchange Students

For those currently on exchange with partner Law Schools, many will have returned to Ireland but will be continuing their studies with the host School remotely (just as those incoming students to the School of Law will continue their studies with us).  Students should contact the exchange coordinator in their host Law School or the relevant module coordinator there in the first instance if anything is needed.

Communication

Given that students won’t be physically present in the building, communication becomes even more important. Students are encouraged to stay in touch with their classmates.  All staff are working remotely.  Academics will continue office hours and administrative staff are available via email.  As issues arise, students should consider where they need to direct their query having first consulted the university FAQs here and determine is it their tutor, module coordinator, staff in the Law Office, the programme coordinator or student advisor? (see relevant email addresses below). The School of Law understands that the current situation will affect some more adversely e.g. through illness, care responsibilities, illness of loved ones, loss of employment, loss of income, accommodation.  Any student facing additional challenges should advise the School as soon as possible and not wait for months on end or worry e.g. about getting medical documents – let the School know – the staff are all fully aware of how challenging it will be for what we hope is a small number of students.

The School will respond to queries appropriately and in an appropriate time frame.  Students are encouraged to engage but at the same time, remember the challenges that staff are dealing with too - working remotely, complex care arrangements etc.  While 100% of emails may not be answered on the day received, the School is committed to doing so where at all possible (and if for any reason, no response is received, students should resend with a polite reminder in a day or so).

Professor Maher finished her email to students by wishing that all students stay safe and well in these difficult and challenging times.

School of Law Emails:

Dean of Law: deanoflaw@ucd.ie

BCL: uglaw@ucd.ie (Ms. Maureen Reynolds)

BCL Programme Coordinator: Dr. Joe McGrath joe.mcgrath@ucd.ie

BBL: margaret.maher@ucd.ie (Ms Margaret Maher)

BBL Programme Coordinator: Assoc Prof Paul Ward paul.ward@ucd.ie

Tutorial Queries: lawtutorials@ucd.ie (Ms Julie Lim)

Outgoing Exchange Student Queries: lawexchanges@ucd.ie (Ms. Ulyana O’Neill)

Incoming Exchange Student Queries: lawincomingexchange@ucd.ie (Ms. Ulyana O’Neill)

Graduate Students: Ms. Niamh McCabe  niamh.mccabe@ucd.ie

Graduate Diplomas: lawdiplomas@ucd.ie  

Programme Coordinator taught graduate programmes: Prof Ian O’Donnell ian.odonnell@ucd.ie

Programme Coordinator for PhD programmes: Prof Joe McMahon joseph.mcmahon@ucd.ie

Student Adviser: Ms. Nadia Clarkin nadia.clarkin@ucd.ie

For library information see   https://libguides.ucd.ie/covid19remoteaccess

University FAQs:  https://www.ucd.ie/about-ucd/about/covid-19specialarrangementsfaqs/

'Fighting Back: U.S. Litigation in the #MeToo Era'

Picture (l to r ):  Dr Deirdre Healy,  Ryan Erickson, Paul Llewellyn and Professor Ian O’Donnell

The UCD Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice hosted a fascinating lecture by Paul Llewellyn & Ryan Erickson (Lewis & Llewellyn LLP of California) in the UCD Sutherland School of Law in March 2020. Organised by Dr Deirdre Healy and Professor Ian O’Donnell, the distinguished guest lecture by the two US litigators was entitled ‘Fighting Back: U.S. Litigation in The #MeToo Era’. In the course of their lecture, they described their work pursuing civil lawsuits on behalf of survivors of sexual abuse which has earned them a reputation as two of America’s leading practitioners in this area.  In 2012, they represented victims in a case against a California School which has since become the largest ever sexual abuse settlement by a school district in United States history. Since that ground-breaking case, their work has helped victims of abuse find justice and, in the process, helped drive institutional change to prevent future instances of abuse.  The lecture was well attended by students and staff and is part of an extensive programme planned by the UCD Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of its establishment in 2020 (contact criminology@ucd.ie for details).

 Ryan Erickson, Paul Llewellyn joint presentation.

Extensive media interest in UCD research on reform of the jury system

Dr Mark Coen and Dr Niamh Howlin of the Sutherland School of Law recently published a major piece of research entitled ‘Judges and Juries in Ireland: An Empirical Study’. The work was undertaken with Dr Colette Barry (Sheffield Hallam University) and PhD candidate John Lynch. It was launched by Chief Justice Frank Clarke at the Criminal Courts of Justice in March. Among those who attended the launch were several members of the judiciary, senior officials from the Department of Justice and Courts Service, and the Director of Public Prosecutions Claire Loftus. The launch garnered extensive coverage across the print media, including radio interviews with Dr Coen and Dr Howlin.

The research team interviewed 22 judges and 11 barristers about their experiences of jury trials and their report analyses this data and makes reform recommendations. The authors argue that provision should be made by law for academic research involving former jurors, as previously recommended by the Law Reform Commission. The report notes that in Australia and New Zealand, countries with similar rules regarding jury secrecy, it has been possible for academics to survey former jurors to learn about their experiences. Such research has helped academics, policymakers, judges and lawyers in those jurisdictions to better understand the needs and concerns of jurors and provided an evidence base for law reform and changes in practice.

Pictured (l to r) John Lynch, Dr Niamh Howlin, Mr Justice Frank Clarke, Dr Colette Barry and Dr Mark Coen

Scholar at Risk at the Sutherland School of Law

On Wednesday 5 February the School hosted a visit by Dr Prosper Maguchu. Dr Maguchu is a lawyer, human rights activist and scholar at risk from Zimbabwe. Currently Visiting Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he delivered a presentation in the Moot Court room on the subject 'Trade Unionism and  Academic Freedom in Zimbabwe.' Dr Maguchu researches in the areas of transitional justice, corruption and financial crimes. The talk was well-attended by staff and students from across the university and was followed by a lively questions and answers session. It was one of a series of talks delivered by Dr Maguchu at Irish universities as part of a speaking tour organised by Scholars at Risk Ireland. The UCD talk was organised and chaired by Dr Mark Coen.

Senior banking figures attend ‘Regulating Bank Culture’ Conference in UCD

(l to r) Dr Joe McGrath with Keynote Speaker, Mr Justice John Hedigan and Ciaran Walker of Eversheds Sutherland

The Sutherland School of Law at UCD hosted a major conference on 6 February 2020 on the subject of ‘Regulating Bank Culture’. This conference brought together leading academics, regulators and industry leaders to consider contemporary issues in banking culture, including recent developments, international differences, and new directions for generative change. In particular, the conference explored key issues related to the following themes: senior executive accountability; diversity and inclusion; board dynamics; promoting trust; and constructive dissent. The Conference was organised by Dr Joe McGrath of UCD Sutherland School of Law, in cooperation with Professor Claire Hill of the University of Minnesota, and generously sponsored by Eversheds Sutherland. 

Jeremy Masding, CEO, PTSB speaking as part of the ‘CEO Roundtable’ with Marion Kelly, Acting CEO, Irish Banking Culture Board to his right

Peter Roebben, CEO, KBC Ireland (left) with c-organiser Dr Joe McGrath

Co-organiser Prof Claire Hill (right) of the University of Minnesota with Catarina Marvão of TUD

Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of UCD Sutherland School of Law opening the conference

(l to r) Seana Cunningham, Central Bank of Ireland, Mike Held, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Ger Deering, Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman and Niel Willardson, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

New book by Prof Oonagh Breen launched by Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan

On Wednesday January 29, 2020, retired Supreme Court Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan launched Law of Charities in Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2019) written by Professor Oonagh Breen of UCD Sutherland School of Law and Philip Smith, partner at Arthur Cox (pictured above).  Hosted by Arthur Cox, the evening brought together academics, charity trustees, policymakers and professional advisers across the fields of law, accountancy and tax who specialise in charity law along with friends and colleagues.  In her opening remarks, Professor Breen recalled the long history of Irish charity law reform, referencing her earlier collaborations with Philip Smith on the Law Society’s Report on Charity Law in 2002; and their work on the Heads of Bill for the Dept of Community Rural and Gaeltacht in 2004.  Launching the book, Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan commended the authors on the clarity of its content, describing the book as ‘an exemplar’ in terms of its valuable guidance on charity governance, the importance of good financial reporting and the role of volunteers.  Referring to the now overdue statutory review of the Charities Act 2009, the judge hoped those tasked with this important work would bear in mind the fine line between necessary regulation and over-regulation. A Bloomsbury podcast interview with Professor Breen on Irish charity law and regulation can be accessed. A Bloomsbury podcast interview with Professor Breen on Irish charity law and regulation can be accessed here.   

Orla O’Connor, Chair of Arthur Cox introduces the speakers

Aedin Morkan, Mazars, Geoff Moore, Arthur Cox in conversation with Ian Brady of Davy

Prof Breen’s colleagues at the launch included Dr Noel McGrath and Dr Mark Coen

Professor Breen with family at the launch of her book

Sutherland Law Seminar Series 2020

The Sutherland Law Seminar Series features lectures on a wide range of topics delivered by Sutherland School of Law adjunct professors and faculty plus a number of distinguished guest speakers.  

The seminars take place on Thursday evenings between 6pm and 7pm and are attended by law students, staff and guests of the School of Law.    

In 2020, the series featured the following distinguished speakers:

6 February 2020: Adjunct Professor Emma Redmond: 'The Real-World impact of Privacy by Design'

Emma Redmond practices privacy and data protection at Stripe and was formerly Head of International Data Protection at Ancestry.com and LinkedIn.com. She acts as Chair of the General Counsel forum at the American Chamber of Commerce and is a Member of the Inner Temple and the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

13 February 2020: Adjunct Professor Paul Gallagher SC: 'The Court of Justice - Legal Reasoning and the Rule of Law in the context of Data Protection'

Paul Gallagher has been practising at the Irish Bar for 41 years. He was appointed a Senior Counsel in 1991 and a bencher of the King’s Inns in 2005. He was Attorney General of Ireland between 2007 and 2011 and is a former vice chair of the Irish Bar Council. He holds degrees in law (UCD, King’s Inns, Cambridge University) and in History and Economics (UCD). He practises widely in the areas of commercial law, european law and public law.

20 February 2020: Professor Imelda Maher: ‘EU Law in Court: Scotland and Ireland compared’                   

Professor Maher holds the Sutherland Chair of European Law and is the current Dean of Sutherland School of Law.  She previously worked at the London School of Economics; the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; Birkbeck College, University of London; and Warwick University. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and was a founding member of the European Law Institute. Professor Maher was also recently appointed an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple.

27 February 2020: Adjunct Professor, Raymond Byrne: 'How Codifying the Law is Our Future Present' 

Raymond Byrne is the Law Reform Commissioner since April 2016.  He qualified as a barrister in 1982 and has published widely on legal matters.  He chaired a working Group whose work led to a Council of Europe 2009 Recommendation on Missing Persons and Presumption of Death.  He is currently a member of the Research Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland.  He was previously Chair of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and President of the Irish Association of Law Teachers.

5 March 2020: Adjunct Professor Bláthna Ruane SC: ‘Legal chaos?  The legal struggle for the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921’ 

Blathna Ruane BA LLM (Cantab) PhD (Cantab) is a distinguished Senior Counsel, a UCD alumnus and established constitutional historian with a PhD in the field from Cambridge University. She was a partner in a leading law firm, McCann FitzGerald, prior to her call to the Bar in 1992. Her research publications include articles in scholarly and professional journals and in books with leading academic presses in the fields of constitutional law and legal history.             

The following seminars were cancelled due to the Covid 19 situation.  Rescheduled dates will be announced in due course:

Professor Matthew Kramer, University of Cambridge: ‘Freedom of Expression as Self-Restraint’ 

Matthew Henry Kramer FBA is an American philosopher and is currently Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He writes mainly in the areas of metaethics, normative ethics, legal philosophy, and political philosophy.

Professor Oonagh Breen:  Philanthropy in Ireland; Exploring the Who, the How and the Why.                                                         

Dr. Oonagh B. Breen is a Professor of Law at the Sutherland School of Law where she researches NGO Law, Governance, and Social Change, teaching both in this field and in the area of Equity and the Law of Trusts. She has worked with the non profit sector, charity regulators and policymakers in a number of jurisdictions (including Ireland, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada).  She specialises in the area of comparative charity regulation and non profit-state collaboration in public policy formation and development. 

Ercus Stewart SC: ‘Fifty Years at the Bar…’                                                                                      

Ercus Stewart SC has practised at the Bar since 1970 and since 1982 he has been a Senior Counsel. His practice centres on civil, commercial and labour law, litigation and arbitration.  He is also a member of the Bars of Northern Ireland, England and Wales and Australia (NSW).  In addition to his law practice, Mr. Stewart is an arbitrator, in international and domestic Commercial Arbitration, and also a Mediator and is a founder member and former chairman of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, Irish Branch.

For fiurther updates please email law.events@ucd.ie. 

University College Dublin, Sutherland School of Law
Ad Astra Fellows (012040)

Applications are sought for Ad Astra Fellows within the UCD Sutherland School of Law. Closing Date 24 January 2020 (17.00 local Irish time).

In support of the 2024 University College Dublin Strategic Plan 'Rising to the Future', UCD has begun an ambitious plan to increase our faculty numbers by 500 over five years. With an initial 5-year contract, research support for these 5 years and the opportunity for an on-going contract subject to performance, there has never been a better time to join the faculty at Ireland's Global University and to live in one of Europe's most vibrant, friendly and connected capital cities.

ABOUT THE SCHOOL: UCD Sutherland School of Law is the leading Law School in Ireland and is currently the only Irish Law School ranked in the top 50 Law Schools in the World by the Times Higher. It is recognised for the quality of its research, its degree programmes and its wider impact in Ireland and internationally. A European Law School in Ireland with an international outlook, the School's distinctive mission is to support and lead on the transformative potential of law for contemporary societies.

APPLICATIONS/FURTHER INFORMATION: Prior to application, further information (including application procedure) should be obtained from the UCD Ad Astra Fellow website: http://www.ucd.ie/adastrafellows/

95 Lecturer/Assistant Professor (above the bar) Salary Scale: Euro 53,773 - 84,544 per annum

Appointment will be made on scale and in accordance with the Department of Finance guidelines.

Closing date: 17.00hrs (Local Irish Time) on 24th January 2020

Applications must be submitted by the closing date and time specified. Any applications which are still in progress at the closing time of 17:00hrs (Irish Local Time) on the specified closing date will be cancelled automatically by the system. UCD are unable to accept late applications.

Dr. Paul Anthony McDermott SC. RIP

The Sutherland School of Law is greatly saddened by the death of our colleague, Dr. Paul Anthony McDermott SC.  Paul was an exceptional lawyer who was a legendary teacher, inspiring generations of students and producing scholarly texts in Contract Law and Criminal Procedure offering major exegeses of Irish law that are hugely influential for legal practice.  In addition, he was an eminent Senior Counsel who was well known to the general public for his insightful and concise opinions especially in newspapers and on the radio.

A UCD graduate, Paul had a BCL (1st class hons), an LLM (1st class) from Cambridge University and a PhD from UCD (under the supervision of Emeritus Professor and former Dean, Paul O’Connor),  Paul taught generations of criminal law students, more recently teaching criminal law, criminal procedure and civil procedure. The latter is often portrayed as a dull subject, but his gifted teaching was such that it was an immensely popular class.  Paul had been a keen debater as an undergraduate and continued to offer ongoing support to students, often acting as judge (he was a judge on the last Irish Times Debating competition). He was Senior Treasurer for the L&H student debating society, a commitment he continued despite his very heavy workload.

Paul had a superb intellect.  He remained deeply committed to legal education and to UCD bringing huge energy and ambition to the School throughout his 20 twenty years here as a lecturer.  As Dean, I found him unflinching in his support – a wonderful listener with his great wit and common sense. It is a shock to be writing this only a few short months after our last meeting.

Our thoughts are with Annick, his two small sons, our colleague James, his brother, and all who knew him. 

Professor Imelda Maher

Dean of Law

                                           BOOK OF CONDOLENCES

Following requests from Paul's current and former students, colleagues and friends, we have opened a Book of Condolences below to record your messages. These messages will be compiled for his family in the future.

Colin Ryan BCL 1997 receives Alumni Award in Law

Sutherland School of Law was delighted to honour our BCL 1997 graduate Colin Ryan at the 2019 UCD Alumni Awards. Colin was selected for the award because of his outstanding career success combined with extensive philanthropic work where he has focused on supporting disadvantaged communities and at-risk individuals. His achievements are outlined by Prof Imelda Maher, Dean of Law in a short video which can be viewed here.

Colin is Managing Director at the Investment Bank Goldman Sachs in San Francisco and is Co-Head of Mergers and Acquisitions for the Americas. During his time in San Francisco, and previously in London, Colin has helped advise some of the most iconic companies on their most important strategic transactions in the technology and media industry, including Amazon, Applied Materials, IBM, Qualcomm, Salesforce, SAP and Vodafone, on over $300 billion of industry-defining transactions.

Earlier this year he was also  a recipient of the Ireland Funds Distinguished Leadership Award for 2019 in recognition of his philanthropy and remarkable business achievements, noted as being a powerful example of Ireland’s diaspora giving back and investing in Ireland’s future.

We congratulate this remarkable law graduate on his outstanding achievements and contribution to society.

Final Year Student Andrea Whelton recognised for her voluntary work

Congratulations to final year Business and Law student, Andrea Whelton, who was recently featured in the annual report on Student Volunteering from Campus Engage, the national network for civic and community engagement in higher education. Their annual report for International Volunteer Day showcased impactful student volunteering across a wide range of community activities.

The report featured case studies from ten Higher Education Institutions and Andrea was highlighted as example of a UCD student who excels in her voluntary work, both within UCD and internationally. She first joined UCD Volunteers Overseas (UCDVO) in 2016, taking part in a four-week education project in Ruaha, Tanzania, teaching computer literacy and English to teachers in a primary school. Enjoying the project so much, she returned the following year in a leadership role, overseeing a group of 14 volunteers. Wanting to continue her volunteering back home, Andrea joined Enactus UCD, a group of students, academics and business leaders that develop social enterprise to help solve societal problems. Through Enactus, she volunteered with HeadstARTS, a project that provides art, drama, music and dance classes to people with intellectual disabilities. Fast-forward to today and Andrea is focusing her volunteering in her local community and seeing what change she can make locally. Volunteering has helped her to develop a broad range of skills: self confidence, teamwork, problem-solving, leadership, planning, adaptability and much more. It has also allowed her to learn about different experiences and cultures, as she has worked with diverse groups from all over the world.

We congratulate Andrea on her outstanding volunteering work both at home and abroad.

Andrea with some local children on her last volunteering programme - “I think volunteering has also allowed me to look at the world in a different way, and be more conscious of the social problems that exist in the world. Volunteering has been my favourite part of my time being in college, and I wouldn’t change my experience at all.”

Professor Gavin Barrett is runner-up in the UCD Research 2019 Impact Competition 

He was awarded for his work 'Democracy in the European Union – getting it right'

UCD Sutherland’s Professor Gavin Barrett was honoured recently in the university-wide UCD Research 2019 Impact Competition, in which he was a runner-up. Professor Barrett's award was for the impact of his research concerning democracy in the EU. His work has looked in particular at the role of parliaments, the operation of referendums, and the sensitive field of justice and home affairs. A video of Professor Barrett outlining details of his research can be viewed here.

Through his research, Professor Barrett has identified various lacunae in democratic controls, including the inadequate (though still evolving) involvement of national parliaments in European affairs, which he analysed extensively in an edited book, an Oireachtas-published report, and a book published by Manchester University Press, as well as in numerous articles and book chapters.

Professor Barrett has also researched Irish referendums (especially EU-related ones), publishing articles in international peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. He co-authored (with then-colleagues in UCD Professors Brigid Laffan, Ben Tonra, Dan Thomas and Rodney Thom) a report laying the foundations of Oireachtas policy concerning the Lisbon Treaty.

His work also played an important role in focusing attention on the illegal and discriminatory nature of voter registration procedures for non-Irish nationals in European Parliament elections, which were subsequently changed. The case study for the award is available here.

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates Professor Barrett on his outstanding achievement.

Professor Gavin Barrett receiving his award from Prof Orla Feely and UCD President, Prof Andrew Deeks

Dr Franck Gloglo appointed McCann FitzGerald Assistant Professor in Law and Business

UCD Sutherland School of Law is delighted to announce the recent appointment of Dr Franck Gloglo as McCann FitzGerald Assistant Professor in Law and Business. He lectures a range of business law and professional legal skills modules at undergraduate, graduate and PhD level. His research focuses on intellectual property law and various issues at the intersection of intellectual property, health and international trade law, and the globalisation of legal education.

Prior to being appointed to this role, Dr Gloglo taught on the Master of Business Law in a Global Context at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Law. His scholarship and leadership in service to community have been recognised internationally through numerous awards and honours, including the Quebec Ministry of Finance and the Center for Studies in Economic Law at Laval University’s Bursary of Merit, the Canadian Ministries of Education Explore Program Bursary, the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen and the Hesse-Darmstadt’s Bursary and the emerging researcher’s Grant of the Center for Research in Public Law at the University of Montreal.

Dr Gloglo holds Law degrees from Benin (LL. B), France (Master), and Canada (LL.D. 2015 – Laval University). He also holds Post-Graduate Certificates in International Intellectual Property Law from the WIPO Academy & Global IP Academy of the USPTO and Justus-Liebig University in Giessen.

Irish Women Lawyers Association Competition Winner

Congratulations to Alison Coyne, PhD in Law student, who was selected by the Honourable Ms Justice McGuinness as the winner of the the  Irish Women Lawyers Association Competition with her letter to Irish Women Lawyers in 2119.  Alison will read her winning entry at the Celebrating a Century Gala in the King’s Inns on Saturday.

Please see this link for her entry:

https://iwla.ie/a-letter-to-irish-women-lawyers-in-2119/

Congratulations to Alison on her success.

McCann FitzGerald Negotiation Competition

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates our students who were winners at the McCann FitzGerald Negotiation Competition organised by the UCD Student Legal Service.  The finals were a culmination of 5 weeks of competition for over 40 teams of undergraduate UCD students. Professor James Devenney, McCann FitzGerald Chair of International Law and Business joined partners and associates in the firm’s ofice to judge the competition finals.  

The negotiation competition challenges teams to analyse a set of facts, prepare a strategy and achieve a favourable outcome for their client against another team. The following students were successful at Senior and Junior level in the competition:

Senior Final: Winners: Katherine Landy and Rachael Mullally. Runners Up: Niall O'Shaughnessy and Niamh McCarthy

Junior Final: Winners: Emily Hetherton and Katie Kilcoyne. Runners Up: Hugh Kilgannon and Eoin Martin.

Prof Imelda Maher and Prof Gavin Barrett books launched at MoLI

Professor Gavin Barrett and Professor Imelda Maher with Ruairí Quinn in Newman House

On Wednesday November 13 2019, members of the UCD Oireachtas Affinity Group, friends and academics gathered in Newman House to celebrate the publication of two books by Professor Gavin Barrett and Professor Imelda Maher, both of UCD Sutherland School of Law.

Professor Colin Scott, Principal of the College of Social Sciences and Law, acted as MC on the evening for the discussion between Professor Gavin Barrett, Head of Teaching and Learning in UCD Sutherland School of Law and Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law, on the topic of parliaments and the EU.

Discussing his book “The Evolving Role of National Parliaments in the EU - Ireland as a case study”, Professor Barrett highlighted how he examines the relationship between the Oireachtas and the European Union, as well as the evolution in national parliaments' roles, the reasons for change and the challenges that must be faced in making further progress. Professor Maher introduced her book “The Transformation of EU Treaty Making - The rise of parliaments, referendums and courts since 1950.” by explaining the process undertaken by herself and her co-author Dermot Hodson in completing the work, including studying a large number of treaties and constitutions from across Europe to explore how and why parliaments, the people and courts have entered a domain once dominated by governments.

UCD alumnus and former government minister Ruairí Quinn joined the panel as a discussant and provided valuable commentary on the wider context of Europe as a political entity. A lively discussion followed, joined by members of the audience.

The session was followed by refreshments and a private tour of the exhibition space in the Museum of Literature, Ireland.

Ruairí Quinn speaking at the Book Launch in Newman House

L-R Tim Hayes, Maria Fitzsimons, Heidi Lougheed & Leo Bollins at the Book Launch & Discussion at MoLi

L-R Prof Maher in conversation with Emer Hunt and Dr Richard Collins of Sutherland School of Law

Caoimhe Gethings & Andrea Whelton triumph in National Moot

(L to R) Tom Casey, A&L Goodbody, Caoimhe Gethings, Mr Justice John MacMenamin, Andrea Whelton and Ms Justice Carmel Steward

Sutherland School of Law congratulates two of our final year students, Caoimhe Gethings and Andrea Whelton, who were overall winners of the 10th National Moot Court Competition. Over 30 teams from 12 institutions competed in the biggest competition to date, sponsored by A&L Goodbody. Four teams – two from UCD, one from Cambridge and one from DCU – progressed to the semi-finals before the final between UCD and DCU.

The final was judged by Mr Justice John MacMenamin of the Supreme Court,  Ms Justice Carmel Stewart of the High Court and A&L Goodbody partner Tom Casey.

Caoimhe, a final year BCL Law with Economics student has extensive debating and mooting experience and was recognised as the best speaker at the competition.  Andrea, a final year Business and Law student has also a very successful record in debating and mooting, representing UCD many times in Ireland and the UK. She has previously won a medal for oratory from UCD Law Society, the Cecil Lavery Moot and was twice a semi-finalist in the Irish Times Debating Competition.  

The Dean and Staff of Sutherland School of Law warmly congratulate these two outstanding students on their success.

Celebration of Twenty Years of French Law Degrees in UCD

Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor speaking at the celebration

In early November, the UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to co-host a celebration of Twenty Years of French Law Programmes with the Embassy of France in Ireland.  The BCL Law with French Law Programme was first offered to students in 1999 and was followed by the launch of the unique, Law Dual Degree in 2006.

H.E. Stéphane Crouzat, French Ambassador to Ireland, joined Professor Colin Scott (College Principal), Professor Imelda Maher (Dean) and Dr Marie-Luce Paris (Academic Director of the Programmes), in welcoming Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor to the celebration.  The theme of the evening’s speeches was ‘The Future of Legal Education in Irish and French Law: Law Languages and Legal Traditions’.  The audience heard inspiring speeches from the Minister of Higher Education, Ambassador and Professor Guillaume Leyte, President, University of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas.  They were joined by graduates Richard Kelly (BCL Law with French Law 2008) and Juliette Fauvarque (BCL/Maîtrise 2018), both passionate advocates of their respective degrees. Richard and Juliette spoke about their experiences of studying in UCD and the excellent foundation that it provides for a future international career.

All four partner universities in France were well represented on the evening with guests including Professor Emeric Jeansen and Dr Georgia Schneider of University of Paris 2, Professor Peggy Ducoulombier of the University of Strasbourg, Professor Hervé De Gaudemar, Dean of Law Faculty, University of Lyon 3, Jean Moulin, Ms Emilie Presthus of Aix-Marseille University, and Dr Charlotte Rault of University of Toulouse 1 Capitole. Other guests included Mr Justice Michael McGrath and Mr Justice Tony O’Connor of the High Court of Ireland.

The event was organised by Dr Marie-Luce Paris, Academic Director of the French Law Programmes with colleagues from the Embassy of France. The speeches concluded with Professor Maher, Dean of Law, congratulating Dr Paris on her organisation of the event and her unrivalled commitment to the success of the degree programmes in the School of Law.

H. E. Stéphane Crouzat with Dr Marie-Luce Paris and Juliette Fauvarque

Students and Alumni with staff and distinguished guests

Alumnus Richard Kelly addressing the audience.

The evening was a wonderful celebration for students, staff, alumni and guests

Dr Marie-Luce Paris, Prof Imelda Maher and Prof Colin Scott greet the Minister

Professor Guillaume Leyte, President of University of Paris 2 in conversation with Juliette Fauvarque

Students and Alumni celebrate the Reunion of French Law Programmes

Eoin Martin, Law with French Law student at Sutherland School of Law

Dr Paris is thanked by Prof Maher, Dean of Law

Reunion of 1979, 1989, 1999 & 2009 Classes

Alumni from the BBLS class of 2009 included Sophie Kenny (left) and Susan Hyland (right)

One of the major events in the calendar of the School of Law is the Milestone Reunion which takes place annually in October.  It is an evening where the School welcomes back alumni to meet their classmates and reminisce about their days in UCD. This year, we were delighted to welcome back many of our alumni from the BCL classes of 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009 and the BBLS classes of 1999 and 2009 (see a full gallery of photos here).  Alumni gathered in the Gardiner Atrium in Sutherland School of Law from 6pm for a drinks reception and the Dean, Professor Maher, gave a short speech at 6.30pm. The evening is for our alumni to re-establish connections with their classmates and catch up on their lives since graduation so, following Prof Maher's speech, the group broke up into separate classes for photos and speeches, returning afterwards to the Gardiner Atrium until 9pm.  Many alumni then continued their evening in the new University Club, nearby on campus.

Next year the Milestone Reunion will be for the BCL classes that graduated in 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 and the BBLS/BBL classes of 2000 and 2010.  We’d be delighted to hear from any alumni from those classes who might be willing to help us contact their former classmates.  Please email law.events@ucd.ie or call 01 7164105 if you would like to get involved.

Olivia McCann, Judge Siofra O’Leary, Sinead Smith and Deborah Maguire from the class of 1989

Dr Maeve O’Rourke (BCL 2009) chatting with John O’Dowd and Professor Imelda Maher

The class of 1979 alumni included (from left) Risteard Crimmins, Diarmaid McGuinness SC and Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell

Simon O’Neill (BBLS 1999), Brian Connolly (BCL 1989) and Andrew Clarke (BCL 1989)

The Dean addresses alumni at the Milestone Reunion

The BBLS Class of 2009

The BCL Class of 1979

The BCL Class of 1989

The BCL Class of 1999

The BBLS Class of 1999

The BCL Class of 2009

Chief Justice delivers Walsh Lecture 2019

The Chief Justice delivering the Walsh Lecture 2019 in Sutherland School of Law

We were honoured to welcome Mr Justice Frank Clarke, Chief Justice, to Sutherland School of Law in early November to deliver the 2019 Walsh Lecture. The title of the Chief Justice’s lecture was "Words words words - Text in the Law" and in front of a large audience of distinguished guests, alumni, students, members of the judiciary and the wider legal profession, he delivered an insightful, erudite and extremely interesting lecture. He finished by taking a number of questions from the audience, including those from law students who were present in large numbers to hear the Chief Justice speak.

The Walsh lecture lecture honours the memory of the Hon Mr Justice Brian Walsh who was a judge of both the Irish Supreme Court and later, the European Court of Human Rights. He also held many prominent legal positions during his career, including member of the World Association of Judges, leader of the Irish delegation on the Anglo-Irish Law Enforcement Commission, President of the Irish Law Reform Commission and founding President of the Irish Society for European Law. We were delighted to welcome members of his family and the current UCD Law Walsh Scholar to the lecture. Axelle Voisin is studying for an LL.M. in International Commercial Law and comes to UCD as a graduate from the University of Angers and the University of Picardy Jules Vernes, Amiens.

The UCD School of Law Walsh Scholar, Axelle Voisin, with the family of the late Mr Justice Brian Walsh

Pictured with the Chief Justice are his wife Dr Jak Hayden and son, Ben Clarke

Ms Justice Gerdy Jurgens, of the Supreme Administrative Court of The Netherlands with Patrick Conboy

Mr Harry Whelehan SC was among the guests attending the lecture

Mr Declan McCourt, Chair of the School of Law Development Council

Dr Franck Gloglo, recently appointed McCann FitzGerald Assistant Professor in Sutherland School of Law

Medals for Top Students at 43^rd Bank of Ireland Awards

Medal winning students at the 43^rd Bank of Ireland Awards

We were honoured to welcome Mr Justice Richard Humphreys to Sutherland School of Law in November to present the 43^rd Bank of Ireland Awards to our top students for the academic year 2018 – 2019.  Justice Humphreys, a former medal winner during his time in UCD, gave an inspirational speech to the students, speaking about the diverse careers and opportunities that are open to them in the future. He  also complimented the parents present for their support of the students and congratulated the Associate Dean, Paul Ward on his commitment to the organisation of these awards for the School. In her speech, Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law, thanked Bank of Ireland for their continued support of the awards. 

Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered an inspiring address to students 

The Bank of Ireland Medal Winners for 2018 – 2019 were as follows:

Tort Essay: Emily Cahill (gold), Síofra Brady (Silver), Melvina Stiebitz (Bronze)

Stage II: Rory Clarke (Gold), Maryia Amelyanchuk and Louis Gribbin Bourke (joint Silver) (Maryia is currently on Erasmus and was unable to attend)

Stage III: Emma Haddigan (Gold), Sean Dillon (Silver), Sinead Britchfield, Sinead Durcan, Hannah Garvey, Stephen Lahert (joint Bronze)               

Stage IV: Joshua Kieran-Glennon (Gold), Lucy Hassett (Silver), Ciara Denihan, Margaret-Ann Gallagher, Jonathan Guy and Niamh Tynan (joint Bronze) (Ciara and Margaret-Ann were both overseas and unable to attend).

Medal-winner Joshua Kieran-Lennon is congratulated by his grandmother

Medal-winner Síofra Brady with her parents and Prof Imelda Maher, Dean of Law (second from right)

Medal-winner Lucy Hassett with Associate Dean, Paul Ward

Medal-winner, Hannah Garvey with her parents

Grace Oladipo and Hannah Garvey win Arthur Cox Awards

Rob Cain, partner in Arthur Cox, presents Grace Oladipo with the Arthur Cox Contribution to Student Life Award (BCL).

Sutherland School of Law was delighted to partner with Arthur Cox recently to honour students who have made a significant contribution to university life, over and above any academic achievement. The ‘Contribution to Student Life Awards’ are open to BCL and Business and Law students when they are in third year, with a prize being awarded for each programme. We congratulate Grace Oladipo and Hannah Garvey, both now in final year, who were awarded, the 2018/2019 BCL and Business and Law prizes, respectively.

The awards were judged by Rob Cain, partner in Arthur Cox, Professor Jason Last, UCD Dean of Students and Associate Dean of Law, Paul Ward.  Rob Cain who announced the winners, commended the wonderful contribution made by all finalists which also included Andrea Whelton, Laura Hogan, Manal Mukhtar, Caoimhe Gethings and Kathleen Connolly.  He commented that all finalists demonstrated outstanding achievements and a strong commitment to making a contribution to the wider community.

Grace Oladipo’s achievements have included her work as an Access Leader, an International Students’ Campaign Co-ordinator and a Students’ Union Class Representative. Grace was responsible for setting up the UCD Gospel Choir which has performed at many events in UCD since its foundation.  Grace has also set up a non-profit organisation focussed on providing long-term assistance by supplying care packs to the homeless.  

Hannah Garvey’s contribution to university life whilst in UCD has been outstanding also. She has been a peer mentor, an active member of three student societies, has represented UCD at a Solicitors Case writing Competition and a Student Managed Fund Competition. She is heavily involved with the UCD hockey team, has volunteered overseas and worked as a sports coach in a university in Canada. She has been awarded a UDC Advantage Award for engagement in sports, academia and volunteering within the university.

The awards were developed by Arthur Cox to encourage students to avail of the opportunities that university offers them. The criteria for awarding are described as those students who can demonstrate that they are ‘catalysts for change, who strive to improve their community, to maximise their own potential, and to contribute to all aspects of university life in a positive and meaningful way’. Sutherland School of Law congratulates both worthy winners on their significant achievements.

Business and Law Programme Manager, Margaret Maher with Associate Dean, Paul Ward and BCL Programme Manager, Maureen Reynolds

Professor Jason Last, UCD Dean of Students speaking at the Awards.

Laura Hogan, former Auditor of LawSoc was one of the finalists

Finalist Caoimhe Gethings with family and friends at the Awards

Andrea Whelton, pictured with her parents, was also a finalist at the Awards

Exploring Direct Provision

 Dr Liam Thornton has launched his new project Exploring Direct Provision. ‘Direct provision’ is shorthand for the range of supports and rights asylum seekers are supposed to be entitled to  in Ireland. Now entering its twentieth year, the much critiqued system of direct provision continues to provoke controversy in Ireland. Exploring Direct Provision makes available for the first time, over twenty years of documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Given that the system of direct provision did not have any statutory basis until 2018, these documents provide a fascinating insight into the inner workings of Government and government departments who established the system of direct provision. The Direct Provision Files provide asylum seekers, researchers, lawyers, activists, NGOs, policy makers, parliamentarians, Government, and civil servants with a rich resource to examine how the system of direct provision emerged and developed over a twenty-year period.

Over 2,000 pages of documentation were scanned for this project by project assistant Róisín Dunbar, from 350 different files. These were organised into 79 core filesets (as of 01 November 2019) by Dr Thornton. Liam collated this information, and has provided a database with a brief narrative to enable persons with an interest in the system of direct provision to understand the underlying rationale for its introduction, and explore its continued operation in Ireland. Website design, development and communication design expertise was provided by Danielle Curtis.

Liam was awarded UCD Seed Funding for Exploring Direct Provision, which ensures the project can continue, with regular updates through December 2020. You can follow the progress of this project on Twitter: @ExploringDP. As well as making available these documents, Liam will regularly provide brief blog posts focusing on particular aspects of the system of direct provision. You can read more about the rationale for this project here.

Comórtas Óráide 2019

An Cumann Gaelach UCD and UCD St. Vincent de Paul have jointly organised a new Irish language speech competition and the Arthur Cox Moot Court of the UCD School of Law played host to the two semi-finals.  

The competition and speeches are though Irish and UCD SVP chose the speech topics based on their social justice policies. Speakers aim to discuss the topics through explaining the problems associated with it, it’s causes, and the possible solutions. Therefore, the subjects would not be debated, but discussed.

This allows participants to engage with the topic without having to conform with debating structures and styles.

The Final of the Comórtas Óráide 2019 was held in the Fitzgerald Chamber of the UCD Student Centre on Thursday the 10th of October at 7.30 pm

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D'eagraigh An Cumann Gaelach agus An Cumann Naomh Uinseann de Pól UCD comórtas óráidíochta nua trí Ghaeilge le chéile agus is sa Bheagchúirt i Scoil an Dlí UCD a bhí na babhtaí leathcheannais.

Tá an comórtas agus na hóráidí trí Ghaeilge agus roghnaigh UCD SVP ábhair na gcainteanna bunaithe ar a bpolasaithe cóir shóisialta. Is í aidhm na gcainteoirí ná na hábhair a phlé trína fadhbanna a bhaineann leo a mhíniú, a gcúiseanna, agus na réitigh is féidir a bhaint amach. 

Mar sin, ní bheadh díospóireacht ar na hábhair i gceist ach pléitear iad. Ligeann sé sin na rannpháirtithe chur le plé an ábhair gan a bheith ag cloí le struchtúir nó stíl díospóireachta. 

Ruth Sherlock

Judges

Former Labour Court Chair, Kevin Duffy, receives Honorary Doctorate

Dr Kevin Duffy (centre) with (l to r) Prof Imelda Maher, Mr Tony Kerr SC, Prof Andrew Deeks and Prof Colin Scott 

We warmly congratulate Dr Kevin Duffy on receipt of his honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws.  Mr. Anthony Kerr SC, lecturer in UCD Sutherland School of Law delivered the insightful citation below at a recent conferring ceremony in the O’Reilly Hall. In front of an audience of graduating students, their families and UCD faculty, he summarised the many achievements and extraordinary work that Dr Duffy has undertaken over a lengthy career in the area of work relations in Ireland.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN HONORARY CONFERRING Tuesday, 3 September 2019 at 5.30 pm

CITATION DELIVERED BY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ANTHONY KERR, UCD Sutherland School of Law on 3 September 2019, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa on KEVIN DUFFY.

President, Graduates, Colleagues, Honoured Guests                                                                                                           

I am humbled to have been asked to deliver the citation today for the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, on Kevin Duffy because, without fear of contradiction, I can say that he has done Ireland extraordinary service.

I have known, or known of Kevin Duffy for just over forty years, specifically since March 1979.

The 1970's and the 1980's were periods of unprecedented industrial unrest; strikes were common- place and essential public services were regularly disrupted. Many employers resorted to the courts to secure orders restraining strikes and picketing, injunctions which were frequently granted on a ex parte basis. On the 27th March 1979, however, the Irish Times reported that Mr. Justice McWilliam, the senior Chancery judge in the High Court, had discharged an interim injunction against the General Secretary and members of the Ancient Guild of Incorporated Brick and Stonelayers- a trade union which could trace its origins back to 1670- restraining them from conspiring together to cause a withdrawal of labour from a building site at Sydenham Road, Ballsbridge.

The General Secretary of the Ancient Guild, and principal defendant in these procedings was Kevin Duffy.

Kevin was born and raised in Patrick Street in the Liberties. He was the second of three boys. Their father was a bricklayer, as were their grandfather and numerous uncles. Kevin attended the local Christian Brothers primary school in Francis Street. Unlike his elder brother Brendan, who went on to secondary school and a distinguished career in the Civil Service, Kevin went to the Technical School in Clogher Road in Crumlin which he left at the age of fifteen to follow his father into the building trade. Kevin became a member of the Ancient Guild and quickly became active within the trade union. In 1973 he was appointed Assistant General Secretary and then General Secretary in 1978.

His talent was quickly recognised within the broader trade union movement and, in 1988, Kevin was appointed Assistant General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Kevin was responsible for the industrial relations division of Congress and part of his brief was to represent the interests of the trade union movement in negotiations with the then Department of Labour on reform of the law on trade disputes and industrial relations generally. These negotiations ultimately crystalised in the Industrial Relations Act 1990. This Act was “incredibly significant” because it was the first piece of statute law giving effect to the agreed vision of the new social partnership model. What the Act sought to do was to achieve a greater degree of responsibility by trade unions in pursuing industrial action whilst providing additional protection for unions which acted with that sense of responsibility.

During his time with Congress, Kevin sat on the Civil Service Arbitration Board and the Bar of Ireland's Disciplinary Tribunal. He was also responsible,together with Turlough O'Sullivan of IBEC,for resolving many challenging and complex disputes.

In 1997, Kevin was appointed Deputy Chair of the Labour Court. The Court had been established in 1946, charged with the task of promoting harmonious industrial relations. In 1974 and 1977, the Court was given responsibilty for adjudicating on equal pay and employment equality disputes, involving legal issues deriving from European law. This trend accelerated in 1997 and, given the increasing importance of legal argument and the regular appearance of lawyers before the Court, Kevin applied to the Honorable Society of King's Inns to become a barrister. Kevin was called to the Bar in 2003. For someone who had no formal education since the age of fifteen,this was an incredible achievement.

Kevin was appointed Chairman of the Labour Court in December 2003. During his tenure, the Court issued many decisions of profound significance to employment lawyers. He was not afraid of seeking the assistance of the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, often resulting in rulings much cited in subsequent decisions of that court, in particular the 2008 IMPACT decision under the Fixed Term Work Directive.

Kevin eventually retired from the Court in 2016, having overseen the transformation of its role under the Workplace Relations Act 2015, but did not retire from public service. He was chosen by the Government to chair both the Commission examining Water Charges and the Public Service Pay Commission. He continues to make a valuable contribution to society providing advice and assistance through weekly clinics for the Free Legal Advice Centre and lecturing on employment law at the Academy of European Law in Trier.

 UCD are delighted today to acknowledge Kevin's outstanding career and his important contributions to Irish society.

_____________________________________________________________________

Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,

Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in utroque Jure, tam civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.

 ___________________________________________________________________

UCD and Mason Hayes & Curran join forces to launch UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran for greater diversity in the legal profession

A new UCD law student support initiative, designed to encourage greater diversity and inclusion in the legal profession, was launched today (6^th September 2019) by UCD Sutherland School of Law and law firm Mason Hayes & Curran. UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran is a suite of resources for students from under-represented groups, and communities with typically low progression rates to third level education, in pursuing a successful career in and with law.

Starting with early intervention programmes at primary school level, the supports are holistic and tailored to each student, providing scholarships, travel bursaries, post-graduate opportunities, alumni mentoring, law firm internships and early career support.   Its innovation lies in its support and guidance before and after the four year undergraduate programmes at UCD Sutherland School of Law.  This recognises that the core student experience will be more impactful and effective if underpinned by critical bridges and transitions in the pre- and post- undergraduate phases.

Speaking at the launch, Chair of Mason Hayes & Curran, Kevin Hoy, remarked, “Ireland is the first country in the world where women constitute more than 50% of the solicitors’ profession, but we have much to do for our legal professions to be truly representative on a socio economic basis.  A modern society needs diversity in the law and UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran will help achieve that goal.  We in Mason Hayes & Curran hope that our contribution will enable students from modest financial backgrounds today to become the extraordinary lawyers of tomorrow.”

 “UCD Sutherland School of Law is now among the top 50 law schools globally and we want to ensure that students from marginalised sections of our society can also participate and benefit from a degree in law at UCD”, commented Professor Imelda Maher, UCD Dean of Law.  ‘The number of UCD law students from under-represented groups has doubled in two years (27 students in 2016 to 59 in 2018) and we can now accelerate that activity through this programme.  We’re privileged to have the support of Mason Hayes & Curran and their visionary leadership on this project, and also for the partnership of UCD Access & Lifelong Learning.’

UCD Sutherland School of Law is the leading centre for legal education and research in Ireland, combining engaging undergraduate and graduate level courses, internationally-recognised research, and world-class educational facilities.

Pictured at the launch of UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason Hayes & Curran in UCD were, from left to right: Kevin Hoy, Chair, Mason Hayes & Curran, Professor Imelda Maher UCD Dean of Law, Professor Andrew J Deeks, President of UCD and Judith Riordan, Partner, Mason Hayes & Curran.

PhD students from around the world attend 2019 Atlas Agora in UCD

UCD Sutherland School of Law was honoured to host the Association of Transnational Law Schools (ATLAS) Agora in June 2019.  The two-week event was organised by Dr Richard Collins and co-ordinated by UCD PhD student, Aphrodite Papachristodoulou. UCD joined the ATLAS network in 2016 and partner institutions currently include the National University of Singapore, Osgoode Hall Law School (Canada), University of Montreal (Canada), Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam (Netherlands), Bar Ilan University (Israel) and Queen Mary University of London (UK). ATLAS was formed in 2006 with the mission of bringing together talented doctoral students in the field of transnational law (broadly defined).  The annual Agora consists of a programme of dissertation workshops, allowing students to share and receive peer and expert feedback on their research, masterclasses, and a series of educational visits and social events. The Agora also provides an opportunity for an annual meeting of the partner universities and a faculty conference showcasing current research in progress.

Prof. Imelda Maher presenting a Masterclass

This year’s Dissertation Workshops included ‘Family law, Gender, Domestic Abuse’, Chaired by Dr Mark Coen, ‘Arbitration, Investment, Law, Law and Economics’,  Chaired by Professor Joe McMahon, ‘Financial Markets, Regulation, and EU Tax Law’ Chaired by Ms Emer Hunt and Criminal law & Criminology Prisoners’. The programme also included two Methodology Workshops: ‘Socio-Legal Research’ presented by Professor Eoin Carolan and ‘Comparative Law / Methods’ by Dr Marie Luce Paris.

Dr. Richard Collins presenting a masterclass

Masterclasses included ‘Managing the Research Process’ (Professor Kalpana Shankar),‘Grant Applications & Proposals’ (Ms Suzanne D’Arcy),  ‘Publishing your thesis’ (Professor Aidan Moran),  ‘Regulation / Economics and Law’ (Professor Colin Scott), ‘Public International Law’ (Dr Richard Collins), ‘EU Law and Regulation’ (Professor Imelda Maher), ‘Litigation & Arbitration’, (Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell),  and ‘Big Data issues and he right to be forgotten’ (Michael M. Collins SC).

ATLAS students with Dr.Richard Collins and Mr. Justice Donal O'Donnell

The day-long faculty conference included contributions from Professor Craig Scott (Osgoode) and Dr Liam Thornton (UCD), speaking on the subject of Human Rights. Professor Michel Morin (Montreal) and Dr Richard Collins (UCD) spoke on Legal Histories. And on the subject of ‘Legal Pluralism and Regime Confrontation’ there were contributions by Derek McKee (Montreal) and Ori Arronson (Bar Ilan). The final topic of ‘New Challenges and Trends’ saw presentations from UCD’s Dr Suzanne Egan and Professor Klaus Heine (Rotterdam).

In addition to the extensive academic programme, the students visited the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Department of Foreign Affairs (including a tour of Iveagh House), the EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, the Guinness Storehouse and took walking and boat tours around Dublin.

The following feedback was received from students who attended the ATLAS Agora in Dublin in June 2019.

"Taking part in ATLAS Agora 2019 at Sutherland School of Law of UCD is one of the best decisions I have ever made during my PhD life. It is an unforgettable experience to discuss my research and share my life as a doctoral student with senior and young fellow researchers coming from all over the world with a glass of authentic Irish Guinness at hand. The summer school provides me with more than insightful feedback on my research. It also brings a group of new friends to my life, a chance to know a country with a long history, and more courage and curiosity to explore the world."

Du Du - Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam 

"The Agora 2019 (Atlas Forum) in Dublin was an incredibly enriching experience. The masterclasses and workshops gave us practical advices and the presenters were all very invested in this event. The Forum also allowed us to share our work with colleagues from all over the world and meet really interesting people. To be allowed to take part in this kind of event truly helps make sense of why we are investing so much time into our work and is so motivating. The whole organization was beyond all expectations and allowed for a very pleasant experience. Thank you, UCD !"

Kenza Sassi - University of Montreal 

" The lecturers were very impressive and varied (psychologist, judge etc.), and expressed interest to discuss and focus on the participants' questions. I took something from almost every lesson: theoretical ideas, tips for the doctoral work or ways of teaching. I enjoyed a lot the common activities that you had organized outside the campus, both on the Irish culture, music, history and the visits in the parliament and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' legal department. I think ATLAS program was a good opportunity to be introduced with ideas and way of thinking of other countries' PhD students, and of course meeting them personally. Finally, the friendly and open atmosphere in the program certainly contribute to the enjoyable experience." 

Ofir Stegmann - Bar-Ilan University, Israel

ATLAS students after the viking boat tour of Dublin

ATLAS students getting a tour of NUI Merrion Sq

ATLAS students at the EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum

ATLAS students enjoying an evening off in Dublin city centre. 

UCD Centre for Constitutional Studies Public Law Conference 2019

The UCD Centre for Constitutional Studies hosted its annual conference in May 2019 in Sutherland School of Law.  The extensive programme on the theme of Public Law included four major plenaries addressing: Public Law in the new Supreme Court; The Impact of EU law on Irish Public Law; Developments in Regulatory Law and Developments in Judicial Review and Administrative Law.  

Speaker Brian Foley BL

In addition to many leading experts on Public Law from academia, law firms and the law library, the Centre was greatly honoured to welcome distinguished members of the judiciary to chair the plenaries.  They included Mr Justice Peter Charleton, Ms. Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan and Mr. Justice Seamus Noonan.

Speaker Ailbhe O'Neill BL

Public Law practitioners who spoke at the conference included Helen Kelly and Aoiffe Moran of Matheson Solicitors and Lisa Joyce from  Mason Hayes & Curran. From the Law Library, there were contributions from Mícheál P O’Higgins SC, Niamh Hyland SC, Siobhan Stack SC, Paul Gallagher SC, Michael Collins SC, Rossa Fanning SC, Brian Foley BL and Bernadette Quigley BL.  The Child and Family Law Panel saw presentations from specialists, Geoffrey Shannon and Sarah Fennell BL. The UCD faculty of Law was also well represented at the conference.  Joining the Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher and the Chair of the Centre for Constitutional Studies, Professor Eoin Carolan, were Dr Kevin Costello, Professor Suzanne Kingston, Dr Sarah Fulham-McQuillan, James McDermott BL and John O’Dowd. UCD was also delighted to welcome Dr Ailbhe O’Neill, Professor Mary Rogan and Sophie van der Valk from TCD.

Prof. Imelda Maher Dean of the Sutherland School of Law chaired the Q&A session 

The Conference of the UCD Centre for Constitutional studies is now in its second year and will continue to be an annual event in the Centre’s calendar, alongside the seminar ‘Constitutional Law: An Update’ which traditionally takes place earlier in the year.  Dates for next year’s events will be announced in the Autumn of 2019.  Interested parties can find out more by joining the Sutherland School of Law mailing list here.

School of Law hosts a major meeting of the European Law Institute

UCD Sutherland School of Law was delighted to host a major event for the Irish Hub of the European Law Institute (ELI).  A distinguished panel of speakers addressed the subject of ‘New Directions for the Irish Legal System after Brexit?'.  This included highly engaging contributions from the Former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Justice John Thomas (photographed above), and Mr Justice William McKechnie of the Supreme Court of Ireland.  The panel was chaired by Mr Justice Paul Gilligan who is a Member of the Council of the ELI and he was joined by Professor Denis Phillipe of the University of Louvain who was one of the institute's founding members. The event attracted an audience of over one hundred and fifty guests which was made up of members of the judiciary, the law library, law society, law firms and legal academics

Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of the School of Law who is the Sutherland Full Professor of European Law, welcomed the distinguished panel and guests and acknowledged that the School of Law was honoured to host this important event for the European Law Institute.   Following the excellent contributions from the panel on the subject, a lively questions and answers session followed with many members of the audience keen to discuss this highly topical subject matter.   The evening concluded with a drinks reception hosted by Sutherland School of Law.

The European Law Institute was founded in June 2011 as an entirely independent organisation with the aim of improving the quality of European law.  The ELI seeks to initiate, conduct and facilitate research, to make recommendations, and to provide practical guidance in the field of European legal development.   Those seeking to become members of the Irish Hub of the ELI can find out more on the website www.europeanlawinstitute.eu or by emailing secretariat@europeanlawinstitute.eu 

 Mr Justice William McKechnie speaking at the ELI Seminar

A large audience attendied the ELI meeting hosted by the Sutherland School of Law

Professor Imelda Maher in conversation with Mr Justice John Edwards of the Court of Appeal

Mr Justice David Barniville in conversation at the reception

Mr. Justice Paul Gilligan chaired the meeting

Professor Denis Philippe, one of the founder members of the ELI

Mr. Justice McKechnie, Professor Maher, Professor Philippe, Mr. Justice Gilligan and Lord Justice John Thomas

Dr Liam Thornton before Oireachtas Committee

Dr Liam Thornton, assistant professor in law, UCD Sutherland School of Law provided evidence to the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality on the system of direct provision recently. Liam’s evidence, based on his legal analysis, noted that the system of direct provision remains a significant violation of fundamental human rights for international protection applicants across a range of different legal rights norms: privacy, right to family life, right to work and a right to an adequate standard of living. You can access Liam’s opening statement to the Oireachtas Committee here, his full submission here, and watch back the proceedings here (from minute ’55).

In UCD, Liam teaches a range of law modules, and in Semester II of 2019/2020 will offer a new law module to stage three law students, LAW37600 Migration Law. Details on this course are available here.

Professor Stephen Calkins to receive Achievement Award

Former adjunct professor and incoming UCD Sutherland fellow, Professor Stephen Calkins will receive the American Antitrust Institute 2019 Achievement Award for His Outstanding Contributions to Antitrust.   The AAI Alfred E. Kahn Award for Antitrust Achievement, first presented in 2000, honours outstanding contributions to the field of antitrust.  The award recognises Professor Calkins’ deep knowledge and experience and his significant contributions across legal scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis which make him a leader in the field of antitrust. His career concerned fighting for competition and consumers and teaching the next generation of progressive antitrust advocates.  Professor Calkins is Professor of Law at Wayne State University, a former member of the Competition Authority of Ireland and later of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and was previously general counsel of the US Federal Trade Commission.

Professional Diploma in Data Protection and Governance
(New)

UCD Sutherland School of Law is delighted to announce the introduction of a Diploma in Data Protection and Governance commencing September 2019. The Diploma is designed to supply training for Data Protection Officers and others involved in the compliance role in organisations.  It will also be of relevance to any legal practitioners involved in this area.

The Diploma has been designed to meet the training needs that have developed in Ireland since the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2018.  GDPR has meant that significant new data protection obligations have been imposed on Irish organisations. As a result, a wide range of organisations must now appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) with an appropriate level of expertise in data protection law and practice.  Organisations not required to appoint DPOs are still obliged to carry out a range of new tasks such as Data Protection Impact Assessments and will benefit from training their staff in this area. This Diploma is designed to meet the training needs of Data Protection Officers and others involved in the compliance role in organisations and the legal community involved in this area.

The programme will feature lectures from staff of the College of Social Sciences and Law and will be co-ordinated by Dr TJ McIntyre.

Graduates of this programme will enhance their competence by adding relevant knowledge, understanding and skills in relation to Data Protection and Governance. The programme will use teaching, learning and assessment approaches such as small group teaching, academic writing and summative examination assessments.

The programme will be delivered through two hour lectures over twelve weeks commencing in September 2019. The lectures will take place in the UCD Sutherland School of Law.

Further information can be obtained by emailing lawdiplomas@ucd.ie or calling 7164114.

Peter Sutherland Memorial Day 

Keynote speaker Ambassador William L. Swing, UCD President Professor Andrew Deeks and Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher

On Friday 29^th March, 2019 the UCD Sutherland School of Law hosted a memorial event for Peter Sutherland. Peter was one of UCD's most distinguished alumni on both a national and international stage. Together with Peter's family, friends, former classmates and colleagues, UCD School of Law gathered to pay tribute to this accomplished man. Lauded as a humanitarian and champion of migrants, Peter built a global reputation over a lifetime of achievements in law, business and international affairs.

Professor Imelda Maher Dean of Law, Keynote Speaker Ambassador William L. Swing and UCD President Professor Andrew Deeks with the Sutherland Family

Ambassador William L. Swing – a former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General who served two terms as Director General of the International Organization for Migration - was the keynote speaker on the day. Mr. Swing highlighted Peters contribution to migration and his creation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development. (See below a video recording of the Ambassador's speech).

Mr. Swing stated - “The significance of which is that it was the first time ever that the governments of the world came together to look at solutions on how better to manage migration responsibly and humanely. This had never happened before. Peter made this happen.”

“The Global Forum was the precursor to everything that has followed since in the field of migration. [Peter] helped to foster an environment where the member states of the UN could come together in a declaration that called for migration to be included in the post 2015 agenda… in contrast to the stark failure of the Millennium development goals from 2000.”

Mr. Swing also mentioned how Peter was passionate in the fight against fake news - specifically in relation to migrants and the threats they pose to the countries they find themselves in.

“He didn’t make himself popular with this outspoken condemnation of anti-migrant sentiment, but Peter was never concerned about being popular but rather by doing the right thing,” he said.

“The Peter Sutherland I knew and admired was a committed and engaged humanitarian… and you don’t always think of CEOs and people in the business world as being humanitarians… [but] people listened to Peter because he was a great communicator, a masterful communicator.”

Erasmus students Mss. Luicile Nasiff and Mr. Daire Cassidy

Peter Sutherland is also well known for having founded the Erasmus programme and it was fitting on the day to have 2 Erasmus students, Miss. Lucile Nassif and Mr. Daire Cassidy speak about their wonderful experiences while taking part in the Erasmus programme in UCD.

Later in the day, a panel discussion took place in the A&L Goodbody theatre, involving representatives from Peter's personal, political and business life. The discussion was chaired by Mr Declan McCourt, Chairman of the UCD Law Development Council with Dr Catherine Day, former Secretary-General of the European Commission, Mr Gregory Maniatis, Director of the Open Society International Migration Initiative, Judge Garrett Sheehan, retired Judge of the Court of Appeal and Mr Rory Godson, CEO Powerscourt Group, and Chair of The Ireland Funds Great Britain.

Panel discussion taking place on the day chaired by Mr. Declan McCourt

The conclusion of the panel saw Professor Imelda Maher present the family with Peter's student record card from his time as a student in UCD.  It was clear from the stories and anecdotes told on the day that Peter left a lasting impression with everyone he met. His lasting legacy, the superb Sutherland School of Law building is indeed a fitting tribute to the highly distinguished UCD law alumnus, Dr Peter Sutherland.  

Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law presenting a gift to Mrs. Sutherland

UCD Choral Scholars performing on the day.

Mr Mark Barr, Arthur Cox, UCD President Andrew Deeks and Ms. Marie O'Connor, Chair of the UCD Governing Authority enjoying the evening reception. 

Keynote speach by Ambassador William L. Swing

Launch of the UCD SLS Law Journal 2019

Congratulations to the editors, Daniel Goode and Fionn Henderson, their team and all the contributors on the successful launch of the UCD SLS Law Journal 2019.  The journal was launched by adjunct professor, Michael Collins SC.

Law students visit Brussels for EU Field Trip 2019

During the study break earlier this semester, a group of Masters students from Sutherland School of Law together with students from the School of Politics and International Relations, took part in a field trip to explore the world of EU Politics.  This is the fourth such field trip which was initiated by Professor Imelda Maher and Dr Aidan Regan with the aim of enabling our students to build an international career.

Students engaged with national and international policymakers and enhanced their knowledge and experience of how the European Union works.  As part of the trip, the students got an opportunity to meet with EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, MEP Mairead McGuinness and Emily O'Reilly of the EU Ombudsman office.

The Masters students who attended were from the European Public Affairs and Law, European Governance, European Politics and Policy, and Political Economy and Public Policy programmes

The trip included talks from UCD alumni working in Brussels, NGOs and private companies, meetings with European Parliamentarians, European Commissioners, and a visit to the European Investment Bank. Students also attended an alumni reception with the Irish ambassador and the annual Saint Patrick’s Day reception in the European Parliament.

A gallery of images from the UCD Alumni Reception in Brussels can be found on their Facebook page.

 EU Commisioner Phil Hogan welcomes students and staff from UCD

The UCD EU Field Trip to Brussels 2019

Students meet with Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness

UCD Ad Astra Fellows

UCD Sutherland School of Law is looking for high potential early stage academics to nominate as candidates for the UCD Ad Astra Fellows programme.  These appointments will be made at Lecturer/Assistant Professor grade.  UCD will make approximately 65 appointments, across all disciplines, this year (with more posts becoming available in following years).  The initial term will be five years with the possibility of permanency after a four-year review.  Ad Astra Fellows will have a reduced teaching load for up to three years and Appointees will receive research support for the first five years, which will normally consist of a PhD student scholarship and a budget for research costs of €5000 per annum.  Candidates interested in applying should contact the Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher deanoflaw@ucd.ie

London Study Trip sees law students visit top law firms and ‘the Old Bailey’

Our distinguished alumnus Vincent Keaveny, welcomes Sutherland School of Law students to ‘the Old Bailey’

During the March study break this year, a large group of UCD Sutherland School of Law undergraduate students spent five busy days visiting top law firms in London.  This is an annual trip, organised jointly with the UCD Career Development Centre and the School of Law. As with previous years, they students had a very packed schedule for their time in London!  UCD is very grateful to our law alumni in the firms who extended an invitation to current students and took the time to give them a taster of what it is like to work in a leading law firm in the UK. Students took part in exercises such as negotiating skills, offering them unrivalled opportunities to get an insight into what it is like to work in legal practice in London.  

In 2019, the following top London law firms welcomed our students:

Slaughter and May, Norton Rose Fulbright, Latham & Watkins, Pinsent Masons, Jones Day, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills

The group was joined by Brian Hutchinson and Dean, Professor Imelda Maher from the Sutherland School of Law plus members of the UCD Career Development Centre.  The undoubted highlight of this year’s trip was a visit by the students to the Central Criminal Court – “The Old Bailey’. This visit was kindly was hosted by our alumnus Vincent Keaveny who is a partner at international law firm, DLA Piper LLP, and has had a distinguished career advising banks and companies throughout the UK and Europe on banking, finance and capital markets matters. He was one of the City of London's 25 Alderman in 2013 and was recently elected as one of two City of London Sheriffs for 2018-2019, a title dating back to the 14th century. He was awarded the UCD Law Alumni of the Year Award in 2018.   

UCD Sutherland School of Law is grateful to Vincent Keaveny and all of our UCD alumni who made this trip a success for our students.

Students taking part in a negotiating workshop in Slaughter and May

Students outside the offices of Norton Rose Fulbright

A workshop at Norton Rose Fulbright

Former President Mary Robinson welcomed by Sutherland School of Law

The Sutherland School of Law was honoured to welcome former Irish president, Mary Robinson recently to speak on the subject of climate change. Mrs Robinson was the first woman elected as President of Ireland, was previously the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and, in 2014, was appointed to oversee UN efforts to tackle climate change.

In conversation with Dr Andrew Jackson from the School of Law, Mrs Robinson discussed how those who wish to make a meaningful contribution to climate change, should make it a personal issue in their lives. Speaking to a large audience made up of law students, academics and practitioners, she expressed the opinion that politicians can be too short-sighted to tackle this critical issue and urged lawyers to take on a more meaningful role in compelling action to be taken. She suggested that the courts could provide the “necessary moon shot” to force a sweeping transformation of the Irish economy to help combat climate change.       

“All over the world court cases are being taken on climate change… I’m glad for that because [the court] is one way of cutting through something and forcing a situation.

Mrs Robinson, who lectured in UCD in the 1960s is a strong believer in the value of education in the advancement of important global issues. She advocates that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals should form part of the curriculum at national and higher education. They include ending poverty, ending hunger, achieving gender equality, taking urgent action on climate change and ensuring responsible consumption and production. 

Former Preseident Mary Robinson and Dr. Andrew Jackson

Prof. Suzanne Egan, Former President Mary Robinson and Prof. Imelda Maher, Dean of Law

"Managing Partners' Award" for Partnership with A&L Goodbody

At the recent ‘Managing Partners’ Forum Awards’ in London, UCD Sutherland School of Law was honoured to win a joint award with UCD Smurfit and A&L Goodbody. The award was for ‘Best collaboration with external specialists’ and was in recognition of the ‘Business of Law’ Masters which was co-developed between UCD and A&L Goodbody. The judges were impressed with the successful partnership between a business school, a law school and a law firm and it was deemed to be a best in kind cooperation between industry and academia.

Professor Imelda Maher, Dean of Law is pictured centre with the team from A&L Goodbody. Host Lucy Porter is pictured left, and Jennifer Miller, from sponsor Vuture on the right.

The development of the Masters programme and its delivery required true joint design and execution. Outcomes and performance arising from the programme are salient. The judges felt that the partnership was likely to have longevity and expand into new opportunities. They liked that others could learn from and replicate this endeavour.  Altogether, the ALG Masters was deemed to result from a remarkable enduring cooperation to strengthen the profession.

The winners of the 17th Annual Managing Partners' Forum Awards were announced at a gala dinner and ceremony at the London Marriott, hosted by stand-up comedian and comedy writer, Lucy Porter. The award received by Sutherland School of Law, UCD Smurfit and A&L Goodbody was sponsored by Vuture.

Elisa Palagi (1962-2018)

Students of European Law from the early 1990s will be saddened to learn of the death, in Italy last November, of Elisa Palagi. Elisa arrived in Dublin in September 1990 to take up a post as lecturer in European Law, teaching on both the BCL and LLM programmes. She stayed in that post for two years before returning to private practice in Brussels, specialising in European and, in particular, European Competition Law. In the late nineties she returned to live in her native Tuscany from where she continued to practise law with colleagues across the EU. She is survived by her husband Alessandro Tozzi, sister Caterina and brother Nicola.

42nd Annual Bank of Ireland Student Awards

UCD Sutherland School of Law congratulates our prizewinning students who were recently awarded medals by The Hon. Mr Justice Michael MacGrath. In Stage 1 the awards are given for a Tort Essay Competition and in Stages 2, 3 & 4, the top 3 students for their overall performance across all law programmes. We are very grateful to Bank of Ireland and the Student Store at their Montrose branch for their consistent and generous support of this event which is now in its forty second year.

Prizewinners with Associate Dean of Law (left), Mr Justice Michael Mac Grath (second from right) and Dean of Law, Professor Imelda Maher (right)

Note: Joint Stage II First Place Gold Medal winner Tara Sullivan and Stage IV Gold Medal winner Conor Gallagher are both abroad studying and their awards were collected by their parents.

 Mr Justice Michael MacGrath speaking at the Awards Ceremony

The Bank of Ireland Prize Giving was first initiated by the late Dr Mary Redmond in 1976 and originally was awarded for the best Human Rights Essay. Over the years, the awards have extended to include prizes for top students in every year.

Many of our other prizewinners have gone on to pursue distinguished academic careers both overseas and at home, for example, Professor Walter Walsh of the University of Washington and Professor Gráinne de Búrca of New York University. The first prize winner Professor Brian Havel is currently Director of the Institute of Air & Space Law at McGill University and the first female prizewinner Professor Deirdre Curtin is Professor of European law at the European University Institute of Florence. Furthermore, no less than eight of our current staff are also previous prizewinners including our Dean, Professor Imelda Maher. Beyond academia, our former prizewinners include many members of the judiciary such as Síofra O’Leary, judge at the European Court of Human Rights. Judge O’Leary herself recently returned to the School to deliver this year’s Walsh Lecture.  Closer to home, former winners include Paul Coffey, Brian Cregan, Richard Humphreys and Aileen Donnelly, all judges of the High Court. The judicial involvement has made the Prize Giving the success that it is today. 

Impact case study award for Dr. T.J. McIntyre

A European law providing for mass surveillance of the entire population was struck down in 2014 following seven years of litigation by Digital Rights Ireland. Sutherland School of Law lecturer Dr. T.J. McIntyre is the chair of Digital Rights Ireland and the legal arguments in the case were based on his research into privacy and data protection rights. This judgment, by the European Court of Justice, was a landmark decision for privacy and has led to similar surveillance laws being struck down across the EU. Dr. McIntyre has testified on the litigation before the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality, which has adopted his submissions calling for reform of the law in Ireland.

Related publications:

Judicial Oversight of Surveillance: The Case of Ireland in Comparative Perspective https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/rest/bitstreams/21070/retrieve

Implementing Information Privacy Rights in Ireland  https://ssrn.com/abstract=2701206

Data retention in Ireland: Privacy, policy and proportionality https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/rest/bitstreams/38572/retrieve

Related videos:

Testimony during Pre-Legislative Scrutiny of the General Scheme of the Communications (Data Retention) Bill 2017 https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/oireachtas-tv/video-archive/committees/1147